Topo
Topo - Gilbert, AZ
digital
2022
With the prospects of very soon starting to sell my work both online and at some upcoming art markets in the coming months, I have decided to start a large collective series of line work drawings portraying some local, unique, and beautiful landmarks and locations from surrounding cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Focusing first on the town of Gilbert, we have Topo; a small food stand in the heart of Historic Downtown Gilbert that serves burritos and soft serve. Topo is predominantly known for its gigantic gopher that sits on top of the building and is a popular location to enjoy ice cream during the hot Arizona summers.
This drawing is somewhat unique for me, in that it was created with the ultimate goal of making prints and selling commercially to locals in the surrounding area. Because of that, I had to keep in mind what sort of illustrations would best appeal to the people in this general area, but also how best and optimal to create the art that would give me the easiest transition into making clean, high quality prints to sell of whatever I wanted to depict.
With those two goals in mind, when wanting to originally illustrate this building artistically, I wanted to create it with pen and ink. It gives me the ability to do a highly detailed and clean drawing, but also the benefits of it being in black and white and easily copiable with a printer. Problems arose though where scanning works in the future can vary in quality and I wanted all future drawings in this series to all look similar in style, size, and quality.
The way I figured out to best do this series then was to create the art exactly how I would traditionally with pen and paper, but just digitally on an iPad. This ultimately fixed all my problems I would possibly have in the future, with the added bonus of being able to clean up some looser line work and mistakes. I think that though it is not created with pen and ink, the level of craftsmanship and techniques used to make it look like pen and ink is still there; and I am very pleased with the results of it.
