Black Hawk Casino, located in Colorado, commissioned Steven Noble to create the new logo identity of their Centennial Buffet restaurant. The illustration depicts the famous prospectors and miners that came into the area, combing the hills for more gold veins. Hardrock mining boomed for a few years, but then declined in the mid-1860s as the miners exhausted the shallow parts of the veins that contained free gold, and found that their amalgamation mills could not recover gold from the deeper sulfide ores.
The illustration was hand rendered from scratchboard in a woodcut style and colorized on a separate Photoshop layer.
