this is a really quick and messy sketch i did of my nephew but i like it because i caught him in this second when he was poised to paint but then suddenly got distracted. his head moved but everything else stayed totally frozen in position. he had a deathgrip on his paintbrush but his other hand held the paper down so carefully and delicately.

everything about his pose said '3 year old' to me.



oh jack i love you

another doug braithwaite study - wonder woommaaannn



digital painting is funny, sometimes i'm like 'man it's so much easier to get this colour i'm looking for' and sometimes i'm like 'where is this colour, if i could only just mix it by hand'

another lil' somethin-something, from a top secret drawing i'm working on for a friend.



it's an alternate version oliver twist where everyone is replaced with gargoyles.

actually no its not. but y'aww ain't he cute?!

also i think this is my first serious attempt at a monster - cool!

this is a study based on part of a Justice cover by doug braithwaite.

i'm suddenly interested in digital painting! it's a lot more crampy than regular painting but im also not used to holding the stylus thingie.

This piece is part of a series entitled Stranger than Fiction, I've used retro and pulp fiction style imagery to explore contemporary neurological case studies revealing that actual science is even stranger than science fiction.

This piece is about Delusions of Sentient Companions: where the sufferer believes inanimate objects are sentient.. and sometimes BFFs!

my nephew jackson, caught in sharpie. this kid does not stay still. ever.

he is my robot-suit building buddy.

I think there can be a tendency to over-conceptualize in illustration… or perhaps it’s just fashionable at the moment. Never underestimate the value of (and NEED for) simple, effective drawings. In every Concepts class I’ve taught, I’ve tried to instill the idea that sometimes a beautiful drawing is enough. Just as “surface” style can become dated, so can “conceptual” style. - Jillian Tamaki

just to prove im still doing stuff! here is part of a larger drawing.

repost, because i finally got a scanner big enough to scan it properly.



click for big.

from this morning; gesture/shape exercises



i saw true grit last night and it was really good! then again, i also would have paid the same amount just to watch jeff bridges drunkenly ramble in a cowboy suit for two hours. i love that man.

i've spent the entire day gesture drawing. i just realized i'm kind of tired. here's one that i liked!

Jillian Tamaki is going to be at TCAF again this year(!!) and she's made the most beautiful poster for it. Can't wait to nab a poster after they're put up around the city. I met her once before but I was so excited that I think I embarrassed myself so I hope to be more composed this time around. She is one of my top fav illustrators.

Annyen watching fantastic mr. fox.



Annyen Lam is an awesome printmaker and bookbinder who has printed with a steamroller.

drawings from the coffee shop today.

a beautiful woman who was sitting in front of me:



i tried to draw this other woman who i see at the cafe every now and then but she saw me. she is always perfectly dressed and looks like she walked out of a vintage fashion catalog. me and my friend both agree that she has eyes like jennifer tilly.

hipster dudes with hats. so many beards, so little time!





and this one, which is not from the cafe:

various: one or two klimt head studies, a guy i drew on the bus, other noodlings.

i'm a sketchbook behind in scanning! so here is some stuff.. i think from early december:

the nerdier savvier of you will recognize klimt's awesome designs in here. sometimes when i look at his figures i see him more as a character designer than anything else:



inking practice



sometimes i like to see if i can do something completely different. this is inspired by my friend jen phelan who is a really sweet illustrator (and who also needs to post her recent paintings hint, hint)

final pencils for part of a drawing i'm working on..

is it just me or does the guy look like jeffrey goldblum?

the value of misremembering

There is an interesting idea on cbc's Spark today, the interviewee talks about the idea that we have that being able to record everything about ourselves - our conversations, our ideas, our stories - so that we remember them accurately is really, really important. She says that we haven't considered what kind of value there might be in the ways our memories work naturally, what if there's value in the way we misremember things? What does it mean to forget things? What does it mean to remember them?

The first thing I thought about was folklore and legends and how a lot of cultural stories seem to be broken telephone type elaborations on something that may have actually happened years and years ago. What would happen to these kind of stories if we could remember everything exactly as it happened?

The full episode is available online at Spark's cbc page.

i have made a cupcake. i can't really bake, so im compensating. further experiments combining digital and analog techniques.

This piece is part of a series entitled Stranger than Fiction, I've used retro and pulp fiction style imagery to explore contemporary neurological case studies revealing that actual science is even stranger than science fiction.

This piece is about Cotard Delusion or "walking corpse syndrome", a neuropsychiatric disorder where the sufferer imagines they are dead, or that their body or organs are putrefying.




and curse of the weredog! arrooo