Playing around with colour, layers and lighting with watercolours. This painting is actually tiny at only about 2" by 5". I still managed to fit in a crow, bluejay, dove, cardinal and nuthatch though!

I really love nuthatches. They're like tiny spaceships that don't care about gravity.

This started as a freeform exercise. You paint and drip water across the page and then drop colour into it - in this picture its the teal blue that pervades through out. Then you take the abstract design and try to polish it into an image or just finish it up as an abstract piece of art. I got my coloured blotches down and all I could see were these two bears out on the mountainside staring back at me.

I took a long time getting back to finishing it up (two years?) but it came out as a very fun illustration. It was on display at a local gallery for a while and it was always the piece that grabbed all the kid's attention. It's by far the most abstract watercolour I've ever done as well. I definitely lean towards representative and illustrative imagery.

My holiday artwork for 2015. It ended up being a bit more rushed than I hoped but I got some really neat effects from the watercolours. Thankfully I already had the sketch of this started from the previous year or I wouldn't have gotten it done at all! I tried getting an Okami-esque effect to the trees.

There are two of the sleepy critters that are actually awake.

A lot of times pet portraits do a wonderful job depicting the physical animal but still manage to miss out on some of their personality and spirit. So when I decided to do a thank you gift for the family of one of the puppies* I have petsit the longest I knew that individuality was what I wanted to try and capture.

Gypsy is incredibly difficult to photograph in action but has so much character - and so many ridiculous moments! She is a complete sweetheart, a bit shy with people, her favourite toys are her plush 'Chippy', and she has a tendency to collect all sorts of interesting things in her very floofy feet. She looks like a show dog when she's recently been groomed but is most content covered in mud, snow or leaves after chasing after interesting smells. Picking which moments to illustrate came down to which rhymes I could make work that were still distinctly 'Gypsy'. I was thrilled that the response to the painting was how many Gypsy memories it immediately prompted.


*Hush. Dogs are always puppies. Even getting older ones.

I finished my holiday art in time to send out some cards this year! I was hoping to push the contrasts a bit further when I watercoloured this but the colours in the washes came out too pretty to force. I love seeing all the tracks and treasures animals leave when everything is covered in snow.

This raccoon is just a little bit suspicious of the woodpeckers intentions now that it has discovered the ornament hoard. To be fair I've seen bird and squirrel nests with some pretty strange human castoffs woven into them. I could see this happening.

It is still very strange for me that I've gotten to the point where I now have to tell people that 'yes I made that' because otherwise its proffessional enough they won't guess...

This is my favourite of the painting studies I completed at my Haliburton School of the Arts course in Huntsville the summer of 2012. We learned a lot of really neat techniques for watercolour to build and layer into scenes that ranged from simple to more complex. Learning how to do washes properly and when to paint wet on wet, damp or dry has been immensely helpful.

My dad also commissioned a custom card to give out to his coworkers in far northern Ontario. He specifically wanted native critters showcased so we have a silver toned fox, a caribou, a lemming, and a grey jay all prepping for the winter festivities. That or eating them decorations. Either way.

I wanted to do a much more detailed picture with lots of animals but I got less than a weeks notice before he needed it designed, coloured, and the 30+ cards all printed!! I'm thinking I might finish off one of those too complex sketched ideas for this upcoming winters card and not have to deal with having such short notice. I did have a nice reason to break out my prismacolour pencils again though. :3

My mom commissioned a holdiay card design from me this year and this is what I came up with for her. It worked wonderfully to be able to send out to folks. Can you find the nuthatch? Its my favourite detail and particularly camouflaged.

This is the cover of an eight page mini-comic I made as my holiday gift for folks this year. It took well over a month to complete the whole thing and I still can't believe how well it turned out overall. I may someday post the other pages or I may continue the story and see about getting it published, but its at least worth sharing the cover of it.

Thanks to Ellen Million for the challenge that prompted this one: ″Crystals! For submitting to EMG-Zine for March. >.>″

The concept behind this ties into an idea discovered while touring ships and museums in the Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada) area on vacation with my dad this past summer. The older wooden ships would sometimes have glass 'crystals' set into the deck as sources of light. The flat top sat smoothly into the deck, so it was water tight and not a tripping hazard, but caught the light and sent it through the facets of the lower side and into the cabins below. When natural light was available I expect that it was a much safer way to light the dark and often cramped cabin spaces than with open flames. We didn't see any in action, but we did see the glass crystals themselves in display cases. I thought they were really cool!

I wanted to try doing the classic fantasy cave lit by magic crystals scenario but instead use the same natural principles the ship's crafters relied on. It was certainly a complex image to do [and I think I managed to beat out my first challenge for complicated light sources].

That hair was both awesome and a nightmare to work on. For years and years I've stared at art and said to myself ″I wish I could draw swirly hair things that look all tangly and cool″. And I tried and it didn't work. And I tried and it didn't work. It was really frustrating. But I got better at other things over the years. And lo! I drew a person with swirly hair too! Yee~

The scanning process made some of the colour fades a bit grittier than they are in realtime but a lot of the detailing still shows through. Plenty of work and time went into colouring this one to give me a chance to put into use things I've learned from colouring other things. The comicing process in particular has helped me improve dramatically.

I've been really inspired by Jan Brett books since I was little where the little details in the decorative borders just keep telling stories in and around the main scenes. Most pictures pan down and end where the panel frames it as if it were being shown through a window (except in things like biological structure drawings), this method rather just splits the scene and keeps going. I've been playing around with similar intentions while comicing to show both above and below water aspects of a scene and figured - why not dirt too? Messed around with the sketch for a bit and then it became a cutaway scene, and I'm having more fun with it than I thought I could. All of a sudden I can tell all sorts of snippets of stories and lives without even having to segment them into the border. Its really really fun.

I actually scribbled this one out way back in May 2006, but only got around to colouring it now. The entire concept is thanks to Great Big Sea and their version of the (apparently traditional) song The Mermaid which a girl in class shared with us. It gets the brain thinking it does...

This has spawned quite the ongoing story that appeared in depth while I was doing an analysis assignment of the phoenix mythos in my symbology course. This poor kid had no idea what he was getting himself into.

So this one took longer than planned to finish. It was going to be my yay!snow card for 2005, but it just didn't seem right once I had it done. Love of the Rain was sent out instead, hopefully to the enjoyment of those who I was able to send it to. In the meantime I had a lot of fun playing around with the borderless colouring style seen here. As well there are only three colours used - the base red, a base blue, and base black. Everything is a shade of one of those three. Skirt is inspired by one I own, other than that, its all brainpowered.

The colouring didn't end up the way I had initially planned for it to be, but it grew into something that I think suited it better. Most of my artwork is just an experiment - will this work, how does this look, what if I do this? The process continues with slight, or major, tweaks and reattemps until I start figuring out how to make the effect work. Unfortunately this lends to the colouring process taking a ridiculously long time to complete. Its a learning experience though.

I find it kind of ironic that after writing the text above as a general blurb, I went back to finally finish off the shading and details of the file whereupon it began looking more and more how I had originally intended it. Particularly that yellow umbrella. Which is apt considering how this image was inspired. My courses at the time had about three readings that for some odd reason contained anecdotes or mentions of umbrellas for some odd reason. One particular story having mention of a lost yellow umbrella out in the (anthropological) field. And now I have this. Happy.

I was very accomplishful in my one class today, as can be seen here. I spent most of the class drawing the dragon (whose tail did wrap entirely around my wrist). As soon as I got back after class I sat down on the floor in the middle of the apartment and watercoloured him in. I wanted to do a pheonix on my right hand to match, but I'm not coordinated enough. Sadly its gone now, but it did survive through most of the day, including cleaning the bathroom!

The completed version of my first challenge. I don't think I could have asked for a more challenging light source, and as frustrating as it was often I'm grateful. I got BETTER. That is the some point of me doing any of these. And its nice to have a challenge - even if it drives me slightly batty in the process. File compression seems to have mucked it up a bit, so I'll have to play around with that and find a way to fix it.

That challenge was ″Draw a strange woman with a tattered gown sitting and/or laying in a bare tree, with lit candles on the branches. Maybe dripping wax. That would make for some cool lighting.″

This was an interesting process. I just did a quick sketch directly on the tracing paper with the pencil crayons and went with it. Hence why ze dragon is so horrendously disproportioned. Pay no attention to its lack of skeletal structure. Just a minor oversight. Really. Whole point was just to see if I could pull off decent lighting in this kinda setting. With a full background and all. Have gained much experience for the next attempt.

This one is a favourite, and one of my fluke pictures. It came out of nowhere, and phenominally close to actually looking like me at the time. Yeah, I love it when pictures come out like this. I must rescan it better though.

Made this while playing around with materials. Whole flocks of these little dudes running around campus, and in my backyard at home. Its absolutely fascinating to watch them. And the people watching them. I can recognize the stance of a fellow critter feeder midwinter - standing off in the snow drifts with a bag full of peanuts or birdseed. I'm so not the only one apparently.

I have always wanted to go to a masquerade, a true masquerade with masks and gowns and dancing that didn't involve jumping up and down while drunk. I mean some individuals truly CAN dance in clubs, and man is it impressive, but generally. No a true full masquerade with lights and mist and gardens and balconies. Straight of fantasy. If I have a chance I'll try to organize it someday, that would be stunning.

A present to one of my friends at school. I met her in world religions class and had decided early on that she would make a splendid elf. Turns out she also completely adores LotR. So my elven version of her was nicely appropriate. Took well over a week to get the details on this one right. I can't believe how well the background came out.

A remarkably good sample from some of my older illustrations. This was a picture for/of my friend Jess. The runes scratched in the dirt spell her nickname 'Thunder'

A quick watercolour study from 2014 that I never got around to uploading. Despite how simple the image is I really like how it came out.

Some proof the practice makes more proficient, these are by far my most successful sketch-day so far. Basically I take a day to go into the museum and sketch things that catch my interest. I want to do this at the zoo someday too! Live animals make for trickier moving targets to draw so these are a good way to practice life sketching to build up experience. All of these animals are on exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, though I think I end up on exhibit too when I sit out of the way to do these. Its lots of fun answering questions though and I'm always amazed how excited and fascinated people of all ages are.

Sometimes while petsitting, when I'm not actively entertaining or walking the critters, I'm able to bring my sketchbook or camera along. This is Buddy-Watson (his dad calls him Buddy, his mom calls him Watson, I call him B-W to keep things simple) and his temporary co-cat Horoscope (daughter's cat was visiting). B-W is the grey tabby with awesome ear tufts and Horo is the orange/white kitty.

There were a number of aborted sketches to get these few polished ones. Kitties are hard to draw when they are constantly on the move! As you can see by the included photos these two are *completely* innocent and have no excess energy whatsoever. :3 I loves them.

That floor mat did in fact have a Horo under it on more than one occasion - and he put himself there. Horo also spent over 5 minutes staring at that spot on the wall where my watch-face reflected the light, complete with sideways head-tilt, while I drew. B-W prefers doing his crazy kitty games on the stairs. There he can do a one-kitty Cirque du Soleil show and run up and down the steps while upside down chasing the feathers-on-a-stick.

Yet another exercise we had this course was to try painting something entirely with soft edges, 'sfumato'. With watercolour that meant painting wet on wet or wet on damp. This allows the colours edges to bleed into each other either a little or a lot depending on how dry you allow the paper to get.

I figured if I was going to paint something fuzzy I may as well paint something that already -was- fuzzy. So with reference to work from I ended up with this fuzzy kitty enjoying a sunbeam. I'm not entirely content with it as a finished piece, but it did work really well with the sfumato effect!

The exercise behind this little painting was on in tones - high medium and low. We had to do 3 small studies of the same painting - one all in very light colours (high), one where the colours are a balance between light and dark (medium), and one with all low or dark tones with only minor highlighting. By the time I finished those I just wanted to have a painting that looked like the scene. So I threw in this one to finish off the set and feel like I had an actual piece of art.

Still basically just a study, but I like how the colours and atmosphere came out. I -think- this one counts as a medium tone painting, but I'm still really bad at determining that unless its blatantly obvious. I guess that's why some folks take actual art school!

2 of 4 seasons painted in watercolour during a 10min exercise. I liked how these came out the best. The goal was to evoke the feeling of the four different seasons using colours to prompt an emotional response. Our choices were to be based off our personal feelings of the seasons. I could see taking the fall study and trying to extrapolate it into a full illustration some day.

Another study from my weeklong summer 2014 painting course in Haliburton. We had the options of working in various media including acrylics and pastels but I focused on developing my abilities with watercolours. I learned a lot more about colours and contrast that I'm looking forward to applying.

A fairly quick exercise to show directional light using watercolour. I threw in a squirrel because I was getting bored of just painting landscapes and didn't have the time available to be more complex at that point. I wish the bottom/foreground was a bit more refined to give the whole thing more depth. I do like the shadowing on the squirrel though.

This was another study from my weeklong summer painting course in Haliburton. I learned a lot more about colours and contrast that I'm looking forward to applying.

A series of greyscale studies I did using a book of landscape photographs as loose reference. I really need to practice a lot more of these so I can achieve better depth and contrast in my coloured artwork.

(The top right image is a tree/stump rotated sideways that had textures to wonderful to pass up.)

More watercolour practice, specifically in painting flowers. I have some complicated things I want to be able to paint that have a lot of gardens in them so I'm working on learning the medium first. These range from basically from memory (Bleeding hearts) to referenced from a garden book (the trillium) or straight from our garden (the lupins).

If nothing else I'm learning that I'm a very impatient painter. And a perfectionist. And knowing when to stop is hard. Well... I kind of already knew those things... but I must be learning something!

... on the window pane. This was an inked scribble to practice watercolours on. That phrase came with it somehow and got written on the back of the paper while I was working on it. I appear to have been messing around with some sort of steampunk costume design too?

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These are a couple of practice pieces for my Landlocked & Lost piece. I wanted some experience on the textures needed for seals and selkie skins. Their speckledy patterns are fun! :3 I also got some more practice with water as well actually because water can be stupidly hard.

These are all true seals (specifically based off harbour seals) and not sea-lions. While all are pinnipeds, true seals can't flip their back fins forwards to walk on.

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A doodle that grew into a more complex sketch, I'd still like to ink & colour this someday.

A simple ink sketch for a gift card

Most of my artwork starts out as small ideas or experiments that I develop into a clean sketch like this. From there I have many options as to how to finish it, if I so choose. This piece was finished with Prisma pencil crayons.

A quick portrait of a friend as a gift, it was really interesting trying to replicate her tattoos.

The linework for the sidebar and banner that were designed to scale as functional graphics when I redesigned my website.

Dana requested I make him an icon for denoting FFF posts on livejournal and I gleefully suggested I make it animated. This is the full frame of that (3x final size) to get more details into the motion than I could working tiny. Later he requested I make up a matching banner for the stories on his site.

My first finallized business card design to match the original website design. I still adore how those northern lights came out.

My friend Devon needed a personal logo to use for one of her projects and asked me to make it for her. It was a very quick deadline but I had a lot of fun incorporating the bright tropical flowers and such a stylized look. Best of all she liked it too!

I was asked to do up a logo for the Ministry of Anime club and was happy to oblige. The club liked the idea of a cherry blossom as a typical anime symbol so I ran with it to this result. For exclusive use by the Ministry of Anime! Check them out at http://www.ministryofanime.com.

A collaboration for a t-shirt design for and with my brother. Basically, he came up with the initial idea and inspirations for what he wanted and I spent a massive amount of time making the beaver look scary enough along with creating the actual graphic. Even the sign and gear are hand drawn. Ian tweaked the gear some as well to make it rounded. We're both quite pleased with the result. Now for me to sit back and see how far my brother takes the result!

I swear this thing took me about a month straight to do. This with working on it like 15 hours a day. Lets just say I'm not a horribly fast drawer. The sketch was quick but then there was all the colour tests and amalgamated tests and more colour tests and finallized colour tests, and scanning and rearranging and doing the layout. It got published though. And representing something I'm proud to be representing. This is now the coverpage/poster for the graphic novel program being introduced to schools and libraries across Canada. I did a ton of reviews for them too. So incredibly cool! And Canadian. I wonder if anyone who knows me will come across it...

Other portraits are currently available.

Other portraits are currently available.