It took nearly 30 hours, but Abou Dembele has done it.
The Montreal university student captured Vancouver in a single line.
Dembele finished the intricate piece of art, the most recent in a series of single-line drawings he's done by hand, all of Canadian cities.
"It was tricky," he says. "I don't want to do things randomly, because, at the end, it has to be beautiful."
The trickiest bit, he says, was the bridges in and around Vancouver.
"There are so many small bridges," Dembele tells V.I.A. "I had to check many times."
Along with the outline of the city, bridges, and major roads, the map has several details, like the city's logo, highway numbers, and the outline of a plane on Sea Island.
If you're looking for the beginning and end of the line, it goes from the top right (in North Vancouver) to the bottom left in the nameplate (yes, that's also part of the single line).
While it's all one line on one 12-by-16-inch piece of paper, Dembele did the piece over several sessions using different pens for lines of different thicknesses to help create detail.
Vancouver was the 15th city he's tackled, and he's quite proud of the progress he's made since trying Montreal first two years ago. As an industrial drafting student, he spends a lot of time using computers; he likes the hands-on portion of his drawing (though he does design the maps on Adobe at first).
He was inspired in part by his own doodles when he was young.
"When we didn't want to listen to the professor we'd draw just to kill time," he says. "Except we didn't draw cities; we'd doodle randomly."
Dembele says he thinks the fact so many people doodled as kids (or still do) helps them connect with his work.
He was also inspired by Tyler Foust, another artist who works with single-line drawings, but Dembele has focused on Canadian cities to create something unique.
He is now selling prints of his work, and while he's continuing with his education, he's hoping to one day turn to art full-time.
