Gilbert Water Tower

Gilbert Water Tower - Gilbert, AZ

digital

2023

Starting off the new year, and continuing further on into my series of local illustrations; we have the iconic Gilbert Water Tower. Located in the heart of the Historic District of Downtown Gilbert, this water tower is a main landmark of the town and area. This water tower, originally constructed in 1925, has become an enduring symbol of the town and serves now as a small park and plaza for the downtown area.

This is actually the second time I have chosen to depict the Gilbert Water Tower; the first time previously being a digital illustration from a similar angle in the style of printmaking and linocut prints. Since it is such an iconic part of the city of Gilbert and since I have predominantly been depicting landmarks from in and around the Gilbert area, I thought it would be best to do an updated version in this illustrative line work style.

Taking the line work techniques that I tried to streamline a bit more for this series into account from the previous illustration, I tried to focus on ways to best shade the water tower without cluttering the sign on the face of the tower and to effectively show the roundness of the structure itself. What I ended up doing was muting the shadows a bit in favor of being able to see the lettering more clearly and I think helped in giving it the recognizability it needed for this somewhat generic structure.

For the trees I chose to go with a simple outline, to firstly match with how I ended the background structures in the previous drawings in this series, but also because I felt like the darkness of what the trees would have been would detract the focus from the center.