Petersen’s Ice Cream & Cafe

Petersen’s Ice Cream & Cafe - Gilbert, AZ

digital

2022

Continuing on with my most recent series of drawing the interesting and unique architecture and landmarks of places in and around the Phoenix area, I am further exploring the town of Gilbert, Arizona. This time highlighting Petersen’s Ice Cream and Cafe.

Petersen’s Ice Cream and Cafe; located in Historic Downtown Gilbert, serves a wide assortment of traditional and unique ice cream flavors. Though it has only been a somewhat recent addition to Downtown Gilbert, Petersen’s has been around since 1919, and has kept its 50s style diner feel with this current location, as well as with its neon sign out front. 

Though Petersen’s Ice Cream is not really an original or key landmark of the city of Gilbert, I wanted to draw it particular because of its unique sign they have out front. I have always been interested in older signs, whether that be hotel or theatre signs, and this one was no different.

Downtown Gilbert itself has a lot of older signage lining the streets of its Downtown Historical District, so in the future, I wanted to touch on depicting those signs as well in this sort of illustrative line work style. So I chose to do this particular sign first as a sort of stepping stone to help me practice the shading techniques that I would also be using on the other future signage, and because of its simpler detail compared to the others.