Welcome to The Vintage Signs of San Jose. If you follow my personal blog, you will know I have been obsessed with sketching vintage signage around the city of San Jose, California for a while now. What started out as just drawing these strangely beautiful signs quickly turned into an obsession. This blog will now be the home of those sketches of vintage signage in San Jose, California.

As an urban sketcher, I like to get out on location and sketch these signs. With my little sketch kit in my bag, I stand around on street corners and record what I see. My favorite part of sketching like this is that it captures a raw, unedited version of the scene before me, not pretty, not polished, yet beautiful in it’s own way, true to the feel and spirit of the place.

This blog is where I record all my sketches of these fast-disappearing signs around the city. If you share a love for art, or of urban sketching in particular. Or a penchant for history and stories, especially of the Bay Area, I hope you will find this interesting. I’d love for this blog to be a two-way street: I will share what I capture in sketches. Perhaps you know of a sign that isn’t on my list of signs to sketch yet? (See my list of signs on the Locations page.) Or you know a story connected with a sign that you would like to share? I would love to hear from you. Just leave a comment here, or write in using the Contact page. Every sign is a story, a wee bit of history. And those little bits of history might be lost unless we can piece them together through our collective stories. So please write, in, follow the blog and share it with friends and family that might be interested, or could share their stories.

Here are places you can follow these vintage sign sketches:

Instagram   Look up the hashtag #vintagesignsanjose
Facebook     Follow along at VintageSignsSanJose
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