San Jose Landmarks

I rarely share the work I do as an illustrator on this blog. But every once, there’s a project that aligns with the sort of content I post here and allows for sharing. This one is a celebration of the City of San Jose through some of its landmarks. I didn’t sketch these on location but I’ve drawn at most of these locations in the past and that really helped keep the pieces fresh and alive for me.

To keep these sketchy, I work on each of them at a pace close to how I’d work on location, and at a size I’m familiar with. In fact, I worked in Stillman and Birn Beta sketchbooks I usually use and tore out and pinned the pieces on my wall as I worked through them.

They’re then stitched together in photoshop and blown up to where each sketch is 3 to 5 feet tall. This small bit below is how you might see a part of a sketch.

While there’s no pixelation because they’re scanned in high resolution, you can see every mark made by the line and the paint, magnified. I really enjoy this effect: the wobbles, drags, and skips of the pen line and the cracks in the paint all show up: It’s work done by hand that doesn’t hide the hand-drawn part.

The project is done now, and my wall is empty again. It felt right to take it all down as the year ends and open the space up to new possibilities.