View Reps...
RSS

PETER ARKLE ILLUSTRATES HIS LOCAL TRADER JOE'S

January 8, 2020

Peter Arkle's illustration career took a dramatic "local boy makes good" plot twist when he was commissioned to create a series of 185 drawings for the new branch of Trader Joe's opening in his East Village, NYC neighborhood. The president of Trader Joe’s had followed Peter's work since 2003 and asked him if he would like to draw something for their newest location. 

"He said I could do anything I liked as long as it had some kind of East Village theme," said Peter. "I decided to walk along very street in the East Village. I started by drawing a map and as I explored each street I would mark it with a red line..."


"It took me about two months to visit every street––walking slowly, looking carefully. I took photos and made notes. I focused on sculptures and other architectural details, weird pipes, parts of electrical sub stations that look like robots etc."


"I am very happy to have been able to draw lots of those sculpted heads (gargoyles, kings, gods, goddesses, angels and cherubs etc.) that appear on so many East Village buildings. Many of these are crumbling away or being painted over so many times that they are turning into blobs. They need to be celebrated. Many of them are very high up on buildings and hard to see without a zoom lens––it amazes me that so much detail was added by architects in places where it could hardly be seen. Did people have better eyesight back then...?"


When I’d visited the whole East Village I then sat down to select which things to draw. This was not a very mysterious process––I basically chose, in most cases, the things that I would enjoy drawing the most. By late spring I had completed a set of 185 small ink drawings.
I then scanned these and enlarged them so they could be turned into vinyl transfers to be stuck on the store walls."






Tags: Peter Arkle, Illustration, Line art, Murals, Poster, Promotional Design

BLOG ARCHIVE

ISPOTTERS IN THE NEWS