donny draws

forward

2012-01-29T10:21:00.006-05:00

twirl

2012-01-23T19:50:00.002-05:00

prepare

2012-01-19T23:12:00.000-05:00

blue jay

2012-01-17T14:15:00.000-05:00

part of the corvid family, blue jays are actually quite intelligent birds. they have a bit of a bad reputation for raiding the nests of other birds and feeding on the young but this apparently might not fully be true. nevertheless, they are omnivorous and do feed on smaller birds. on the flip side, they are able to make a wide variety of calls and can even imitate hawks. whether for selfish reasons or not, when blue jays detect a predatory, they make calls to indicate this and other birds within an earshot get the warning as well. people refer to their calls as jays, hence the name. they are the provincial bird of prince edward island and the mascot for a certain local baseball team. cyanocitta cristata in moleskine.

grounded

2012-01-07T23:24:00.000-05:00

blue crab

2012-01-07T14:43:00.002-05:00

these omnivorous little guys are favoured by seafood lovers for their sweet, sweet flesh. their latin names actually mean "savoury beautiful swimmer." the blue / sapphire colour of their pincers lends to their english names although females have streaks of red to them as well. like some of the seafood humans eat, crabs are bottom feeders. we don't eat many land bottom feeders though, do we? these crabs will eat just about anything including other, smaller blue crabs. cannibals! while highly senstive to their environments, these crabs are great swimmers as they're equipped with paddles on their hind legs (of which there are ten). they can be found in coastal canada all the way down to south america. callinectes sapidus in moleskine.

highlight

2012-01-01T19:57:00.001-05:00

messenger

2012-01-01T19:10:00.002-05:00

sink

2011-12-22T22:27:00.003-05:00

bestiary: black widow spider

2011-12-20T01:46:00.000-05:00

i thought all bites by black widow spiders would be fatal to all humans but apparently this is true mostly for young children or the elderly. still, their venom is fifteen times more poisonous than a rattlesnake and it leads to muscle pain, nausea, and paralysis. no thanks. then again, this is on humans. smaller animals and insects have to worry a lot more—including male black widows. many people know that males often become fodder for the females after mating and this of course has lead to their names. interesting from a male black widow's perspective then, isn't it? my species is named because our "women" eat us. after sex. see? your life could be worse, no? or you could be another insect that falls prey to black widows. they paralyze their food and liquify an insect's insides and then go to town. no wonder people are freaked out by these things. latrodectus hesperus in moleskine.

separated

2011-12-16T00:25:00.000-05:00

i recently watched ji lee's creative morning talk and i thought his student exercise of illustrating a word's meaning typographically using really only the word would be a fun little thing to do here and there. having never gone to art school, i never got an exercise like this and i guess i wasn't smart enough to just try and do something like this without having heard about it first. anyway, if i don't have time to ponder illustration friday's topic as much as i want, i may try and do these typographic doodles.

here's the talk, if you're interested:

bestiary: black footed ferret

2011-11-28T00:15:00.001-05:00

what's most surprising about these guys is how vicious they were with prairie dog populations. they would hunt these rodents down in their own underground dens! they're also known as praire dog hunters. i mean, come on. squirrels, mice, and rats were not safe either. also suprising is how much these nocturnal guys sleep. nearly 21 hours. they're like sloths! i think. they were once hunted for the pelts but it sounds like the removal of prairie dog burrows by farmers in the 1900s has led to this species becoming endangered. mustela nigripes in moleskine.

black bear

2011-11-19T13:24:00.001-05:00

when i think of black bears i think of...the office. jim impersonating dwight: "what kind of bear is best? FALSE. black bear." and "bears. beets. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA." i digress. the first interesting tidbit about black bears that i have is that they can actually be a few different colours. they can be white! cinnamon. bluish (which i think is awesome) gray or black. brown. they spend their summers pretty much alone, eating just about everything. everything. their dormancy in the winter was once not really considered hibernating but that might have changed now. regardless, they don't eat, drink or go onesies or twosies during the winter. black bears were created by the great spirit, according to early inhabitors of the americas (grizzlies were created by the evil spirit). also, winnie the pooh was named after a london zoo female black bear named winnipeg. ursus americanus in moleskine.

steve

2011-11-13T17:53:00.001-05:00

here's to one of the greatest risk takers of our age. even if you don't like his company or his products, i'd be willing to bet that his and his team's work influenced the product you chose as an alternative.

calvin

2011-11-08T00:32:00.001-05:00

jeff hamada ovet at booooooom recently asked his followers what their first and last cd purchases were. i used that as the basis for some portraits, which i kind of missed doing. the first cd that i can remember buying was doggystyle by calvin cordozar broadus, or snoop dogg as we all know (of) him. technically, i also about dr dre's the chronic the same day but only one portrait for the first and the last. i ~~don't~~ make the rules. a portrait for the last cd will come.

bestiary: bird of paradise

2011-11-05T15:59:00.001-04:00

this classification is a bit of a cheat i think as there are something like forty species of these birds. i do have to keep things as simple as possible though. hailing from australia, south africa, and new guinea, these birds usually have some very dramatic and showy feathers and colours (i say that as if they choose to dress this way or something). since there are so many species, it's hard to report on anything less general than they eat fruit and bugs. i leave finding out more about these birds to you.

bestiary: bengal tiger

2011-10-29T14:06:00.001-04:00

as the names suggest, this engandered subspecies of the tiger family can be found in india. they're the largest of the cat family and unlike many a movie might suggest, they tend to avoid humans unless they're a bit mad. i wasn't aware that they hunt nocturnally. they're individiual down to their stripes and very independent, typically living alone as adults. males do not raise their cubs, yet females will raise their young until they're old enough to hunt. that usually takes about three years. i also didn't know that white tigers are recessive mutants of bengal tigers. the chinese seemed to prize tigers for their medicines but they were also poached largely as trophies for their fur. panthera tigris tigris in moleskine.

we have the power

2011-10-27T02:58:00.001-04:00

i don't bother with many contests but for some reason i like what the folks at positive posters are doing. they choose an issue each year and the competition involves designing a poster to spread awareness for that cause. the ideas are simple and the winning posters typically have been very simple. this year's brief allowed the entrants to choose their own cause. this seems like a first world problem at first but i chose the idea of energy and its conservation, use, renewal, sourcing, impacts, etc.
anyway, a simple light bulb printed in a particular way would sort of get across all the different angles i was thinking. the bulb would be printed with glow in the dark ink. the base would be printed with some sort of reflective or metallic ink. the light bulb itself is an obvious reference to energy i think but it's also a typical symbol of ideas or so-called light bulb moments. all of this together would foster awareness in and remind viewers about energy conservation (the bulb is "uplugged" and it's glow is finite), use (the glow), alternatives (phospherescence "powers" the bulb), renewal (bright lights "charge" the bulb), etc.
it was nice to focus on something more conceptual considering that most of my work has been focused on the bestiary lately.

bestiary: beluga whale

2011-10-24T19:45:00.001-04:00

contrary to their name, these whales do not produce the caviar that seems to be so sought after. these are white whales. not the type that captain ahab was after though (sperm whale, in that case). they inhabit arctic waters but inhabit warmer waters when arctic oceans freeze over, lest they become food for polars bears or people. they're most notable because of their melons. seriously, the lump on their heads is referred to as a melon and is comprised of oily, fatty tissue. i'm not sure if this is some sort of survival related feature but belugas can change the shape of their heads by shifting air around in their sinuses. more survival related, they are among the only whales that can actually turn their heads. they lack dorsal fins in favour of dorsal ridges. delphinapterus leucas in moleskine.

bestiary: beaver

2011-10-16T19:33:00.001-04:00

say hello to canada's national animal. i never really thought about it like this but national geographic puts it well when they say that these rodents are engineers of sorts, chewing through trees to use for their dams and lodges (homes). it's interesting that they're considered rodents and yet they are not so nimble on land where most other rodents seem to be the most adept. their webbed feet and tails allow them to easily manoeuvre through rivers, lakes, and the ponds their dams create. more evidence that they seem built for the water: the can hold their breath for nearly 15 minutes and even have a set of transparent eyelids. they have built in goggles! i love it. they'll often build their lodges smack dab in the middle of a pond and make the entrance underwater. now that's what i call not wanting to be disturbed. castor canadensis in moleskine.

bestiary: baltimore oriole

2011-10-10T01:01:00.001-04:00

while most probably known for being the namesake of a certain professional baseball team, the baltimore oriole is also maryland's state bird. how did these omnivorous little guys get to be a state bird, you ask? well, i'll tell you. their colours closely matched the coat of arms of lord baltimore, cecil calvert. these orioles are migratory, leaving the eastern US and canada in favour of warmer climates in mexico and central / south america in the winter. icterus galbula on moleskine.

thanks

2011-10-09T22:15:00.002-04:00

i'm not going to go into why i think this man was so special - i think everyone has his/her own reason. his passing was quite surprising and unbelievable to me. here's my little tribute of thanks to mr. steven p. jobs. condolences to his family and friends.

a more detailed version:

and, of course, a white version:

keeping things spicy

2011-10-04T02:45:00.001-04:00

i have largely been working on the bestiary drawings but i miss other media. so, i'm going to throw in the odd experiment here and there for no good reason other than to provide some variety.

i have good days and bad days staring at this. i chose to self impose a basic colour combination and only paint in gradients. i'm going to try some other so called basic combinations as well. i'm going to guess they'll be ugly / uglier.

bestiary: bald eagle

2011-10-02T18:11:00.001-04:00

it's pretty common knowledge that ~~white headed~~ bald eagles are the national symbol of the united states but i had no idea that these birds of prey were nearly, er, extirpated (locally extinct) in the land of the free. hunting definitely had an effect on their numbers but the use of ddt (that showed up in the fish they ate) really sent their population in the u.s. in a nosedive. once ddt was banned though, the birds' numbers rebounded successfully. i also thought that being birds of prey, bald eagles only hunted for live animals but they do feed on carrion as well - sometimes the carcasses are those of whales! this and the fact that they have been known to bully food from away from other animals led ben franklin to vote against them as the american national symbol. these eagles are another example of animals that usually have one mate for life. they lay only a few eggs per year in their nests that are among the largest of any bird today. haliaeetus leucocephalus in moleskine.

bestiary: bactrian camel

2011-09-24T12:14:00.004-04:00

the main difference between these and arabian (dromedary) camels is the number of humps each has. bactrians have two instead of one. consequently, they can go even longer without plants and water in even harsher conditions (from about 40°C to -30°C) with the extra storage. i suppose it is fitting that when they can drink water, they can do so at ridiculously fast rates. like more than two gallons per minute fast. bactrians are the only true wild camels in the gobi dessert and yet they are very endangered. estimates say there are less than 1000 left. camelus bactrianus in moleskine.

bestiary: baboon

2011-09-18T20:32:00.001-04:00

baboons live in troops that number in the hundreds. they vocalise to communicate within the troop but good old physical force does the trick for the males as well. interestingly, they spend a fair amount of time grooming each other, ridding one another of insects and the like. i'm not sure why their groups are called troops though. a school of fish; a herd of cattle; a troop of baboons? perhaps they're militant? they do eat meat but tend toward more vegetarian diets, often annoying farmers in the african and arab regions they inhabit. baboons are old world monkeys - a distinction i'm finding a little hard to comprehend. aside from tails that don't grip trees, i believe old world monkeys have different nasal and dental structures from apes. papio hamadryas / papio / anubis / cynocephalus / ursinus in moleskine.

bestiary: aye aye

2011-09-12T10:35:00.002-04:00

just about everything i read about these guys is new to me. aye-ayes are nocturnal, spend their life in rainforest trees (in eastern madagascar mainly), and are the largest of nocturnal primates. they kind...woodpeck...with their long, slender middle fingers to get at insects within branches and trees. until i read it, all signs indicated a very timid creature but they're apparently quite fearless. they've been spotted just kind of strolling through villages or don't mind cozying up to people in the wild, if they're there. on the flip side, they're known as omens and are killed on the spot by locals who believe this. daubentonia madagascariensis in moleskine.

bestiary: atlantic puffin

2011-08-29T21:20:00.003-04:00

people seem to liken puffins to parrots because of their colours but their appearance seems more akin to penguins to me. their habits are quite penguin like as well, if you ask me. technically though, they're in the auk family. the key divergence from penguins is that they are amazing fliers and can reach speeds of nearly 90 kilometers per hour. 400 flaps per minute. you try that. they're also amazing swimmers and actually use their wings to power their motion and use their webbed feet as rudders for steering. they can dive down about sixty metres. i really didn't know that they spend quite a lot of time at sea - usually for an entire winter. like emporor penguins (i believe), atlantic puffins select a mate and return to one another every mating season. both the male and female incubate a single egg, per season...so the women don't have to lay the egg AND go foraging for food. and seemingly related, yet unrelated, puffin books is an imprint of penguin books. fratercula arctica in moleskine.

bestiary: atlantic blue fin tuna

2011-08-20T16:55:00.000-04:00

a source of guilt: eating delicious tuna sashimi...toro....whatever cut, i love it. nevertheless, i try to eat less of the stuff but i have not been able to completely will it out of the diet. maybe one day. being more conscious of the food i eat and where it comes from is something i'd definitely like to focus on, where i can. respecting the animals i eat is important to me. it's crazy to me that such large fish are endangered. longer than i am tall, this type of tuna spans over two metres in length and weighs in at about two hundred fifty kilograms, on average. the surprise among my fact-finding is this: they're warmblooded fish. not earth shattering news but perhaps a good bit of jeopardy trivia. but this allows them to wander into very cold atlantic waters. they eat just about anything. kelp. plankton. crustaceans. squid. eels. etc. they seem like the jocks of the sea. they're built for endurance and speed sometimes migrating from north america to europe several times a year. they're also delicious. to the point that they have been heavily overfished. maybe that one day to stop eating this fish will come sooner rather than later. thunnus thynnus in moleskine.

bestiary: asian lion

2011-08-13T18:15:00.000-04:00

a good friend of mine recently realised that there are no tigers in africa and no lions in asia. turns out, he was partly wrong. a very small, endangered population of lions exist in the gir forest in india. asian or asiatic lions aren't that different from african lions - they're just a bit smaller. panthera leo persica in moleskine.

bestiary: armadillo

2011-08-07T14:00:00.001-04:00

these "little armoured ones" are quite unique among mammals, most obviously because they are the only such mammals to come packaged with armoured shells. i had no idea that there are nine varieties of these animals who can grow up to five feet in length. at that size they're over hundred pounds! i wonder how much of that is typically due to their shells which, curiously, not all types of armadillos rely on for defense. some have too many plates to be able to roll up and completely encase themselves. only the three banded variety seem to have that option. mostly they run away however some run into patches that are thorny or treacherous enough for their predators (big cats, bears, and even raccoons) but not so treacherous that their own armour cannot protect them. they're rather poorly equipped from a vision perspective but of course, they can smell quite well. being relatives of sloths, they sleep. a lot. like sixteen hours a day lot. and like ant-eaters, they have long sticky tongues that they use after digging to get their fill of insects though they are omnivores. and the final random fact: those in andean regions used to make musical instruments out of armadillo shells called charangos.

bestiary: arctic skua

2011-08-01T12:25:00.001-04:00

so if you're ever asked to describe an arctic skua in a word or two (i know i have), you can simply answer with: kleptoparasite; or, parasitic jaeger. jaeger is german for hunter. they do find their own food (eggs, small birds & mammals, fish) but their hunting methods are a bit different, i'd say. they spend a fair amount of time stealing food from others. they are pirates...of the avian variety. let's be clear though, they don't just, you know, sneak into the dens of other animals and yoink some food. no no. they team up during flight and body check their victims into dropping the food they caught and reap their rewards. they genuintely rob their victims. i always thought that if it occurs in nature it's a good model for whatever you're adapting that principle on...i guess i'll draw the line here. a bit of etymology: skua means seagull in old norse. stercorarius parasiticus in moleskine.

dribbble invite up for grabs

2011-07-25T12:18:00.001-04:00

i've got a dribbble invite if anyone is interested. let's see some portfolios, people!

bestiary: arctic hare

2011-07-23T18:30:00.001-04:00

so finally (at least to me), the difference between hares and rabbits? hares are bigger. longer ears. taller hind legs. i find it interesting that they can be loners but you can also find them in groups of thousands. i'd love to see that. thousands of arctic hares! i'd probably miss them though. it'd probably be winter and i'd probably not seem them camouflaged in the tundra. also, i wouldn't be out in the dead of winter in a patch tundra. i kind of like that during mating season, they pair off and do their own thing. they establish their own territory away from others. and crazier still, they can run up to sixty kilometres an hour! what?! lepus arcticus in moleskine.

the king's speech (spoken like a true prince)

2011-07-16T17:40:00.002-04:00

while playing with a print set i just bought, the idea's just came like flashes and this is the result. this is hand made with no digital mucking about aside from scanning it. i had a good laugh researching this one, i must say. i'm not completely set on the title and alternative title. i think it needs one or the other but i'm not sure which yet...both will have to suffice for now.

details here:

and here:

bestiary: arctic fox

2011-07-13T22:45:00.000-04:00

sly samoyeds? i suppose not. their white coats definitely help them camouflage in the winter although i'm not sure how much that helps them as predators. they eat fish, rodents, rats, and such but in the dead of winter, there can't be that many of those critters around, can there? ah, solution. they get their proverbial sloppy seconds by eating in the wake of the kills of polar bears. those beautiful white coats do protect them well from the cold though. they can survive temperatures around -50 centigrade.....brr chilly brr. also crazy: females give birth to sometimes fourteen little babies. fourteen! vulpes lagopus in moleskine.

bestiary: arapaima

2011-07-09T13:52:00.000-04:00

still considered a fish, these guys breath air. i always thought that would qualify the animal as a mammal. because of this trait, they keep to the surface of fresh water. and while they feed on fish, their stomping grounds give them access to birds which they also sometimes eat. so they breath air and they eat birds. that's a hell of a fish! this proximity to the the surface also exposes them to humans too though, and we like to hunt everything apparently. strangers still, their tongues are kind of bony and have their own teeth! crazy. arapaima gigas in moleskine.

bestiary: arabian (dromedary) camel

2011-06-18T16:16:00.000-04:00

they only have one hump. what does it store? fat! this is how they can travel so far without water. i've always known that they've been domesticated for quite some time but i had no idea they're eaten. camel burgers! although, bubonic plague was thought to have been a result of eating camel livers a few years ago. crazy. camelus dromedarius in moleksine.

bestiary: ant

2011-06-06T02:13:00.001-04:00

i think we all have a bit of knowledge on ants. they live in really intricate colonies, sometimes underground, sometimes in wood, or sometimes not at all (depending on the species). their strength to weight ratio is incredible. there's usually one queen in a colony. there are over ten thousand different species. they burn under focused light from a magnifying glass. i didn't know that worker ants are typically female. and the males, well, they just mate with the queen. they possibly die afterward too. i've always found their method of communication fascinating and i didn't learn this until my final year of university. a colleague's thesis revolved around basing network routing rules on the chemical / pheromone based communication that ants use. as they travel, specifically in search of food, they leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of their pheromones. ants that successfively follow the trails sense the stronger or more, um, pheromonic trails and reinforce the "scent" as they follow the trail to the food source. the weaker trails tend to vanish. it works in nature, so why not try it elsewhere, right?

bestiary: anglerfish

2011-05-30T00:51:00.001-04:00

national geographic says that these are possibly the ugliest animals on earth. poor guys. they need love too, right? you might remember one such fish from a certain disney movie about a certain clownfish (link to appear when they're drawn...if i remember). the largest of these fish (of which there are hundreds of different of types apparently) are over three feet long. that's over a hundred pounds of ugly-fish! not my words, national geographic's i swear. what's crazier is that their mouths are flexible enough for them to be able to eat prey that is double their size. so if you are one such fish, don't call them ugly and don't look at their ~~fishing rods~~ dorsal protrusions. anglerish in moleskine.

a fish out of water is.....

2011-05-21T18:34:00.001-04:00

just a quick little ditty for illustration friday this week. the theme is soaked. i thought i'd take a different perspective on the meaning.

bestiary: andean condor

2011-05-14T16:41:00.001-04:00

these birds are so massive that they prefer to inhabit moutainous or ocean regions with strong winds so that they can glide more easily. i'm talking thirty pounds with a near eleven foot wing span. huge. they're actually vultures (strange nomenclature in my mind) and as such feed on dead stuff, sorry, carrion. males have these offshoots from their snouts/beak called a caruncle - another interesting word. both males and females are bald and have white collars though these are more prevalent in males. i didn't know that these birds are the national symbols for argentina, bolivia, chile, colombia, ecuador and peru. it's interesting to me that these birds feed on the dead yet in andean mythology the birds are associated with a sun deity, essentially as ruler of the upper world, and are a symbol of health and power. andean condors in moleskine.

matt berninger

2011-05-05T02:20:00.001-04:00

i played around with all manner of colouring for this after i brought it into photoshop and while i found certain results interesting, i opted for the most minimal. here were a few of those experiments.

decent contrast here but the details of the original drawing kind of got lost.

another alternative:

i tried to let the background provide some contrast and restore some of the detail.

overall, i actually liked the process that went into achieving the two draft versions but i didn't like that i lost the detail that i feel needs to be seen. finding that process was a happy accident, just not one that jives with this portrait i think. i guess the lesson for me was that i can't always be calling an audible on the final output. i should work on planning more...maybe. matt berninger of the national.

canada votes

2011-05-01T22:25:00.000-04:00

considering the saturation of canadian politics in and around this popsicle stand, i decided to draw the (major?) candidates for our nation's captain's chair. i'm not overly political usually so rather than try and get exact likenesses, i just tried to let go. i guess if i were pro-any-party, i probably would've focused on getting the leader's portrait right. if i'm not mistaken, a similar situation almost caused an election not to long again, which prompted this little doodle. we shall see what happens. stephen harper, jack layton, gilles duceppe, and michael ignatieff in moleskine.

bestiary: american crocodile

2011-03-31T02:53:00.000-04:00

these guys live as long as humans. i didn't know that, like many of the animals i have and will be drawing, they're endangered. that's part of the point of this project of mine. i remembered from school that you can tell crocodiles from (american) alligators by their longer but thinner snouts. also, they don't like the cold as much as alligators. they seem to eat just about anything, including humans but that (apparently) is rare. crocodylus acutus in moleskine

prints - a blaffair to rememblack and leslie nielsen

2011-03-23T02:30:00.010-04:00

you can now get your "a blaffair to rememblack" and the more recent portrait of leslie nielsen through society 6. tell all your friends! thanks in advance!

american bullfrog

2011-03-02T19:55:00.001-05:00

these guys moo. seriously. they sound like cows. which is awesome. it seems like they're pretty easy going. they live in many, many parts of north america, asia, south america, europe....nearly everywhere. seemingly like their cousins, they'll eat just about anything they can put in their mouths. insects. of course. mice? yup. snakes. ok, let's do it. birds. why not? wait, what? yeah, they eat birds. craziness. see? easy going. then again, some of the latter animals are also their predators so size matters here people. i didn't know that they hunt nocturnally. also, people eat their legs. bullfrogs, aside, calling them american bullfrogs only makes me think of budweiser commercials from back in the day. rana catesbeiana in moleskine

norwegian wood

2011-02-22T03:13:00.002-05:00

my entry for don't panic's poster design competition for the film adaptation haruki murakami's norwegian wood. jonny greenwood did the score! i'll post more about the design after the competition closes at the end of the week. enjoy.

robin

2011-02-16T03:46:00.002-05:00

portrait of robin pecknold. before i learnt that a certain band's new album will be released this saturday, fleet foxes's new album was probably the one i was anticipating most. i'm currently rotating between in rainbows, high violet and fleet foxes. two out of three ain't bad, right? maybe if i work on an illustration of the national, they'll announce / release a new album? at the rate albums are released these days (and i'm not complaining), probably not. but here's to hoping? i might post the process later but there wasn't much behind it though a wee bit of "undocumented" thought went into the colouring.

surrender

2011-02-04T01:30:00.001-05:00

the topic for illustration friday this week is surrender. my first thought was to do something more suggestive or passionate but ambiguously so. i thought if i depicted someone's hand tightly gripping someone else's hand that might depict surrender if the other hand were limp. at the same time, a tight grip on someone else might suggest conflict as well, where people tend to surrender. and, according to hollywood, conflicts that begin like this, seem to somehow end up in the extreme surrender of pants coming off.

but with what is going on in egypt right now, that just got me thinking about conflict in general. these things seem to seldom resolve in stalemates and only one side seems to ever benefit and that's only if the conflict comes to a close. that last little tidbit got me thinking about the the never-ending feud between israel and palestine. it seems so much more extreme considering neither side seems willing to surrender or back down. i'm not very versed in the history of that conflict or even the present state but it doesn't seem to me that either side is tremendously "stronger." it seems like someone will have to let go to end the cycle.

geiss & donaghy

2011-01-25T03:21:00.056-05:00

here we have jack donaghy and his mentor don geiss, reincarnated into a peacock as one episode suggested. the intent behind this illo was to try and preserve a little but of humour while revealing some traits of the inventor of the tri-vection-oven.

essentially, this is about the relationship between donaghy and his mentor. also, i just wanted this to remind viewers of the rather hilarious storyline involving them and ~~gob~~ devon banks and their battle to succeed geiss. argus was don geiss's pet peacock whom donaghy inherited after geiss's passing. donaghy ended up believing that the soul of don geiss resided in the peacock's body and in a strangely profound (for 30 rock...right??) way reinforces the idea of donaghy's devotion to nbc. so instead of the peacock's usual tail (which i thought was too obvious), a certain television network's logo is suggested. but this isn't just to reference nbc - it's also to try and show that jack is using the logo to compensate for the peacock not wanting to dazzle us. donaghy's a fixer so this is his fix to try and dazzle and sell you on something he wants you to do.

i don't think i will post much on the process this time but i did draw and ink this on a much larger scale than usual. scanning that in proved to be a bit of a palaver but it turned out ok.

here are some more detailed crops:

deja vu

2011-01-11T20:58:00.000-05:00

illustration friday's theme is deja vu this week. the first thing i think of is...."a deja vu is usually a glitch in the matrix." also, i finally saw inception recently so the whole what is reality theme must be a bit more present in my, um, subconscious. or something. where's my totem?

bestiary: american bison

2011-01-06T13:56:00.000-05:00

not to mistaken with buffalo, these guys can weigh a tonne but can run at speeds of nearly sixty five kilometers per hour. they eat grass though so they won't be coming after you for a meal, only if, you know, you piss them off. i didn't know that the males and females generally live separately save for mating season. like many a good male, they fight over the ladies but they don't go to the point of killing eachother. sensible, right? another fun fact is that their hides are so well insulated that snow can accumulate on their backs not melt. bison bison in moleskine.

bestiary: amazon horned frog

2010-12-22T00:57:00.001-05:00

their nicknames? pac man frogs. because of their large mouths. apparently they'll eat just about anything, often hiding until something that isn't bigger comes near. then they pounce and try to eat. i say try because there apparently have been cases of deaths due to trying to consume something that couldn't be swallowed. they don't chew. this is just pure craziness to me. i like me some food but not that much, ha ha. this accounts for their large size. strangely enough, there is no real explanation behind their horns outside of the thought that they might aid in camouflage. interesting. ceratophrys cornuta in moleskine.

calligraphic foray

2010-12-17T00:10:00.004-05:00

go easy on me, this is literally the first time i tried writing out the alphabet in gothic lettering. behold my new bookmark.

side a:

side b:

in a few millenia, i might have nice hand writing.

black swan posters

2010-12-14T23:23:00.000-05:00

these are fabulous. done by la boca. will keep an eye on their stuff. (source: booooooom)

luca barcellona

2010-12-04T17:22:00.002-05:00

i think this video was posted just about everywhere a few months ago and for very good reason. i was pretty impressed with the control and smoothness of luca's marks but i just about had a fit when things started connecting so seamlessly. if you haven't seen this yet, seriously watch it - it's worth it. especially if you're at all interested in lettering of any kind.

luca posted some more videos to promote calligraphy, showing off his talent (not to mention crazy tools!) along with a very talented, fellow calligrapher francesca biasetton. my favourite of the new videos is below but go check them all out on his vimeo page.

i just bought myself some of those wide markers and i plan on making a mess of things. i really wish they made them in magenta though. are you listening, good folks at copic?? i also impulse bought one of their disposable fountain pens today as well. i realised that i really missed more fluid ink when i did leslie nielsen's portrait so i'm gonna try and mix things up a bit more again.

leslie nielsen

2010-12-02T12:22:00.003-05:00

leslie nielsen passed away on the 28th. he kind of fell out focus (at least with me) but understandably so considering how old he was - how many people keep working after a certain point? i kind of grew up on his movies in that his were the comedies that were sort of prevalent / popular when i was young and my dad loved them. and i watched what he watched. who didn't see airplane? or the naked gun movies?

i had no idea how prolific nielsen was. he was in more than a hundred films and appeared in more than fifteen hundred tv programs. that's just crazy. he lived a pretty decently long life (eighty four years), has stars on the canadian and hollywood walks of fame, and is an officer of the order of canada. rest in peace. i won't call you shirley.

space issues #3

2010-11-28T02:56:00.001-05:00

for the third iteration, i wanted to use blocky lettering to imply the issue at hand. after playing around, the sketches i ended up with reminded me of the first things first manifesto. i was really taken with the lettering used in the original version so i used a similar version here, at the risk of contradicting the manifesto's intent.

part of what i love about the lettering is the contrast not only of the widths of the stems to the negative space between them but to the space between letters as well. what really makes the letters shine for me is the angled terminal at the top of each "t." i really wanted to try and work that into my design but it just didn't make sense to.

the curious thing about the lettering to me is how the space between the letters really influences the perception of the height to width ratio. when spaced so closely together, as in the original manifesto, the letters seem quite tall. as you might see above, the lone "i" above seems quite comfortable on its own but its length seems to be emphasised when placed with the rest of the letters in "issues." anyway, that's an aside.

the group of designers, photographers and students essentially pledged to devote their skills to higher purposes, specifically over hawking wares for the sake of consumerism and nothing more. this poster might not suggest the opposite since there really is no great purpose to the poster. as with the others, this one's just supposed to cause a smirk maybe and be ephemeral. and if people like it enough, sure i'll make prints. but i recently worked on something where i was told, why bother put the all this thought and effort into something if no one's going to get it? well, like the manifesto kind of suggests, it's about doing a good job but i think that a good job should be done on everything you do.

if i put effort in and something isn't communicated well, then it wasn't as good a job obviously. but the challenge is to make that communication work, even in something as silly as this. the real irony is that you probably got none of this just from looking at the poster, unless of course you're familiar with the original 1963 manifesto.

i chose yellow specifically because i don't use this colour enough. in trying to keep things simple, it's tough to use yellow on white but why not put it on black? sometimes yellow is perceived as cowardly but i think it works in an ironical sense here. i don't think it's cowardly to admit that you have issues. on the flip side, yellow is also perceived as bright, happy, and cheerful (especially in contrast to the usually negative black). again, nothing wrong with admitting that one has issues. accept it and move on, right? finally, i chose to imply the space issue but simply leaving space there. you can either see the space for what it is was intended or you can fill it in an personalise the poster by admitting to your own issue.

inspiration vintage

2010-11-20T16:17:00.001-05:00

a friend has decided to take the plunge and make clothing inspired by different eras in the past. you can take a look here

space issues #2

2010-11-10T00:57:00.000-05:00

the border is there just to show the overall grid and layout. i decided to dead centre this to create the underlying space issue (at least one of them). i thought about absolutely evenly spacing the letters over the entire layout but i like the word search implication. i can't help but try to string together different words by starting somewhere in any which direction. wasn't that some alternate game to traditional word searches? i can't quite remember. i have a terrible need to keep working on this to make it more interesting but i just want these to be very quick, ephemeral, and playful without too much going on.

space issues #1

2010-10-29T02:43:00.000-04:00

i feel like i've been conjuring up some quite complicated concepts and the execution of these ideas hasn't been very great. for my next design related things, i just want to come up with a simple idea, plan things out very minimally, and study the repercussions of the initial planning and the more spontaneous decisions that seem to always occur come development time (not to mention the more traditional aspects of space, form, etc.). hopefully the execution won't suffer as much with less to work with.

i swear riding on the tube to and from work is slowly making me develop temporary fits of having space issues and i just thought it would be funny to take the idea further. i like the idea of a self referential design that still talks to the owner/viewer. i have a few ideas as to how to implement this concept in different ways so there will be a short series of posters by the end of this. perhaps three or four in total, they'll all typographic in nature. lately i'm really struck by just how much we look at letters as accepted "shapes" without (having or) taking the time to appreciate the forms that compose the letters and gaps and spaces in between.

since this is the first of these posters, i've left it as basic as possible. no colour, no texture. i wanted to use letters large enough to not only overflow outside of the boundaries but also start to create an ambiguity between the positive and negative space. sans serifs like these tend to need a fair bit of white space to breath but i still think this is quite readable, given the anti-letter-spacing and size of the type. this size also helps to bring the negative space to the forefront, especially since the similarly shaped forms tend to lie in loose groups.

i might look into letterpressing these at some point as well, depending on how happy i am with the series. enjoy.

Threadless x (RED)

2010-10-25T20:00:00.006-04:00

I decided to try my hand at a tshirt design for the threadless loves (red) contest. Some of the designs are pretty cool. If you like mine enough you can vote for it here. thanks in advance.

bestiary: alligator snapping turtle

2010-10-14T20:35:00.000-04:00

whew, been pretty busy with a couple of jobs and an illustration i'm chipping away at. yes it's 30 rock related. anyway, here's another one for the bestiary. these guys are also indiginous to the u.s. but have found their way to asia. they honestly look a little dinosaur...ic....to me and apparently i'm not the only one to think so. they're carnivorous but they scavenge, mainly on fish from what i've read. no natural predators for these snappers. i didn't know they can live to more than one hundred years! apparently they don't bite. much. they can amputate your digits! macrochelys temminckii in moleskine.

it's a doodle-off!

2010-09-21T19:18:00.001-04:00

i just found out about this and despite the lack of time, i couldn't resist doing something quick just to participate. doodlers anonymous has started a showcase through which they'll run contests with themes not unlike (i'm guessing) illustration friday. i've spent a lot of time on more involved drawings and such lately that little quick things like this are pretty refreshing. showcase #1's theme is: napkin. go draw something quick, there's only 15 hours left!

bestiary: alligator gar

2010-09-20T15:17:00.001-04:00

so here's a fish that i had no idea existed. these guys are the largest of the gar species, reaching ten feet and 300 pounds. i cansee these guys being (mis)featured in some 3d horror fish movie but they don't really seem to attack humans. they're eggs are poisonous to us though. they're native to waters in the US and seemed to be fished for pretty regularly. some parts of the states consider them a bit of a delicacy not unlike, well, alligators. atractosteus spatula in moleskine.

samurai i am awry

2010-08-23T22:24:00.007-04:00

i do love me some 30 rock. if you've been paying attention, i finished a movie poster for a blaffair to rememblack a little while back. 30 rock is one of those shows where the one-liners come out of nowhere and then sometimes they just disappear all together to make room for more. for my next project, i wanted to try and incorporate some of my favourite lines and moments. rather than try and posterise this one, i just wanted to have fun with an illustration.

the underlying inspiration is one tracy jordan line: "i spent nine months in japan filming samurai i am awry." when i first heard the line i thought he said, "samurai i-amurai" and that he was just making up a ridiculous word. in doing research for rememblack, i actually saw the written text and had a good chuckle, long after the fact.

genius.

one of my favourite scenes from the entire series comes from the first episode where tracy is seen running down a highway in tightey-whiteys and tube socks, wielding a toy light sabre, and screaming, "i am a jedi! i am a jedi!!"

again, genius.

so that scene also needed to be alluded to in this illustration. in continuing with this story that i made up to drive the illustration, i took the liberty of setting it in japan and assuming that he didn't actually finish filming the samurai movie. his character just doesn't really finish anything. but in his defense, in this alternate 30 rock dimension (30-D?? lame), he finds a real lightsabre. would you keep on filming a movie if you found a light sabre? i rest my case.

i like that 30 rock embraces the cliches and makes fun of them so i wanted tracy running off in a meadow or something toward a sunset in a very cliche way. while doing so he would just shed his samurai armour and sword along his path. i realised early on that if he were running off toward the horizon, there would be little to tell the viewer that it's tracy jordan outside of the title and his outfit from the first episode. but this is a drawing for 30 rock fans who i hope will understand.

here is the initial sketch:

originally i was going to make this a tad more destructive. tracy would've just been trying (and succeeding!) to cut up everything in his path. so you can see singed tree stumps and sliced trees and grass if you look closely. i decided against this though as i wasn't sure if there would be just too many elements drawing the viewer's attention in so many directions. in more experienced hands, this probably could've been done effectively but i'm not going to claim that my hands are anywhere close to that.

another problem was that there really wasn't any imagery to suggest the japanese landscape. cherry trees came to mind but i thought the more obvious choice would've been a pagoda or temple silhouette or something. i just very quickly (and crappily) drew up where i wanted the trees to be and the temple as well.

so far so good. i got to drawing more detailed trees and i also decided to leave out the temple / pagoda. just wasn't feeling it. i did a cleaning of my studio recently and i can't find the final pencil sketch of the trees so on to the inking. i'm not sure if i'll make a habit of this but i thought i'd try inking in steps and scanning the results to try and save time if mistakes were made. here's the rough progression:

the original is 11 x 18" and was scanned in a couple of times and stitched together in photoshop. here is the full piece and some detailed shots.

i have to admit i didn't really think too far ahead about the colour palette but i decided to stick to what i guess you'd call realistic colours. one thing was for sure, tracy jordan would want to rock a lightsabre coloured like the only "bad ass muthafucka" jedi - mace windu. also, tracy's underwear had to be white.

the trees, field, hills, and sky were pretty much decided on in this kind of typical field setting. for the sky, i did want to have a nice blue-purple-red transition. i wasn't overly sure about the colour of his discarded armour though. he seems to wear a lot of red so i thought about doing a red and yellow scheme but i kept being reminded of the flash or ironman. i pondered it while moving on to colouring tracy's socks and shoes.

as soon as i got to his shoes, i remembered the episode where tracy not only dons golden shoes, but is too proud to be helped to lug around the weight. another great scene and that answered the question for his armour - gold!

the colour process overall took longer than i thought. this post is getting pretty long so i won't really detail it here but i may update this later on. i ended up with many, many layers and a 500+ mb file - take that yuko shimizu!!

here is the final piece. i hope you enjoy it, i had a lot of fun doing this. i'm not sure if i will do another 30 rock piece but once the season starts i may just change my mind on that.

plusminus - positive posters 2010

2010-08-09T01:29:00.002-04:00

here's a longer post to hopefully try and make up for the lack of updates. i've been busy but i made time to quickly work on this.

i came across this poster competition on the swiss miss blog and i thought it would be fun to enter. positive posters is a non-profit poster competition founded by nick hallam and run by volunteers. they basically just try and spread a good message through the competition. it started last year with the theme of change and this year's is "a glass half full" from a more positive viewpoint.

i spent a few days on my daily commutes brainstorming. i won't detail the concepts i didn't follow through on but i decided early on that i wanted to keep things as simple as possible. the concept of polarity immediately jumped in my mind (being the nerd that i am) and so plus and minus signs were the images i wanted to use to reflect the positive and negative outlooks people can take on this classic saying.

here are some of the initial sketches. hopefully you can see some of the thought processes i (might have) had.

the basis for the theme essentially is perspective. so my first thought was to make the poster work in any orientation, - landscape, portrait, upside-down, or right-side up. no matter the layout, i wanted a positive sign to always be recognisable. the simplest idea that i went further with came from the third image of sketches and is as below.

this is just a draft but the idea was to have the inked surface cover fifty percent of the poster but it's probably not exact in the depiction above. the border wouldn't have been there either, i just drew it on here to show the boundaries of the poster. rather than just plop a plus sign right in the middle or any other area, i thought about having it "float" in the liquid represented by the inked surface - ink...liquid...get it??? also, instead of the more obvious black and white, i went with magenta - slowly becoming a favourite colour for design. the brief reminded us about the fact that these posters should stand out in a cityscape because the winning poster will be printed 4000 times and plastered around australia. to keep things basic then, i wanted to stick with one of the CMYK colours since the nature of the poster is pretty basic. yellow and cyan don't seem like they'd stand out so magenta it was.

sidenote: to try and validate the choice of colour, i looked up magenta and i found some interesting points. it's an extra-spectral colour, meaning that it cannot be perceived with out two wavelengths of light. so it's got that duality thing going on right? a bit of a stretch. more interesting though is the origin of it's name. a conflict called - what else? - the battle of magenta in - where else? - magenta, italy occurred shortly before the discovery of the dye in that region. so that was kind of relevant to me - a negative conflict may have brought about something positive in the discovery of the dye and, you know, hopefully the conflict occurred to bring about positive consequences. validation? check.

anyway, the good thing about the plus sign is that no matter what orientation, it still looks like a plus sign. here's the same version upside-down.

in the first version the plus sign is white and blends in with the background and in the flipped version, the liquid would be white and so it blends in with the liquid at that point. it's pretty plain that the plus sign doesn't seem so obvious. and in the inverted version, the liquid isn't really filling half the glass. it gets worse in either landscape format.

the other idea i thought would've been interesting to pursue involved patterns of plus signs. i haven't worked too much with patterns so i thought i'd try and take that a bit further. you can sort of see two attempts in the sketches but something jumped out at me for one of them. the plus signs in the positive space started to form minus signs in the negative signs in the negative space. this idea responded well with me for obvious reasons.

so for the second attempt, the abstraction of the half filled glass would be presented as a pattern of positive or plus signs that align to form negative signs in the negative space. rather than have the positive signs just cut exactly half the page, they're staggered but the ratio of positive space to negative space is about equal. the staggering also helps lend to a layout where the positively spaced area is just slightly larger than the negative (i actually calculated it), which biases the outlook to the positive. also, the negative or minus signs are only really perceptible in landscape layout. either way, more plus signs are always visible than minus signs. so in those ways, the poster really is more positive than negative. the result is below.

and here's the "inverse" version:

this version is kind of interesting because the plus signs seems to occupy the negative space and the opposite is true of the minus signs - so a bit of irony there. also, the minus signs seems to resemble drops falling into the magenta liquid - at least to me.

so why a tilted liquid level? well, here it is rotated. notice also that the minus signs are a bit more obvious.

the impression i wanted to finally leave things off with is that the poster that is the "cup" is being tilted but enough for the contents to come out yet. so is the liquid being enjoyed and sipped? or is it being poured out and wasted? that's up to the viewer.

i was a bit bummed at the fact that it's not a true pattern because if you try and tile this, you obviously won't get the impression that it's a never ending barrage of plus signs formed by a succession of posters aligned adjacent to other versions of the same poster. BUT, now that i look at it again, a similar effect can still be achieved:

and it's still possible to have a level "liquid"

so that makes me happy.

even if i don't win, this was tonnes of fun to do. the rest of the entries are here.

bestiary: albatross

2010-07-20T00:25:00.005-04:00

i don't remember much from my high school english classes. being the techno-geek that i am, english was not very high on the interest scale after the ninth grade. the asian six pack was though! but for some reason i do remember the rime of the ancient mariner, by samuel taylor coleridge. i had never heard of an albatross and after having heard the description, i imagined them to be quite giagantic birds. what i didn't remember about the poem was the reference it made to the birds being a sign of both good and bad luck. ravens seem to share this same ambiguous symbolic meaning so for me there is a nice alternative when it comes to imagery. i find it funny that of all the animals i've drawn for the bestiary though, the two with such ambiguity happen to be birds.

they are indeed large birds with wingspans that can exceed three and a half metres (over eleven feet for you empirical folk). i guess this helps them to efficiently soar over large distances with minimal effort. they eat fish and shell fish but they do scavenge as well (another similarity to ravens). there are twenty one species of albatross and nineteen are considered threatened. the amsterdam and chatham albatross are considered endangered. long line fishing is not a friendly activity for these birds. hopefully they're still around by the time i finish this bestiary.

bestiary: african lion

2010-07-07T01:17:00.004-04:00

i thought these guys live longer but their average life span is ten to fourteen years. males are closer to ten due to the fact that they fight with rivals regularly. apparently the stamina of lions isn't great. they can get up to pretty fast speeds of fifty miles per hour but they're sprinters, not lovers i mean marathoners. they hunt in packs. although i think the lionesses do the hunting. unfortunately, the populations of lions is also diminishing due in part to loss of habitat and humans being humans. panthera leo in moleskine.

ell

2010-06-23T00:18:00.003-04:00

so the lack of posting can mostly be attributed to this latest commission. oil on canvas. a photo reference was provided. i've been planning out a new tracy jordan inspired illustration so back to that i go. perhaps i will post progress but most likely it'll all come out in one post. depends on my lazy factor, ha ha.

african elephant

2010-06-20T13:04:00.004-04:00

another entry for the bestiary. these guys have four and three toenails on their front and hind feet, respectively. that's one less on each foot than with other species of elephants. they also have rounder ears, a longer and lower jawbone, and straighter, more downward and smaller tusks. their molars (four usually) weigh over 10 lbs! what i really didn't know is that females have tusks as well. loxodonta africana in moleskine.

what type of print?

2010-06-17T23:51:00.008-04:00

so i've been reading elements of typographic style by robert bringhurst. it's quite technical and thorough and i'm really enjoying it. honestly i wasn't sure if i should get it when i first came upon it in the bookstore but the endorsement in armin vit and bryony gomez-palacio's book, graphic design referenced, along with a strong recommendation from a friend convinced me. check it out if you've any interest in typography.

i'm not completely through it but i came across a line that gives me hope for print. i love printed posters, illustration, design, etc. and it seems like there's this huge forecasting of the death of print. in the case of wall hangings, it doesn't make sense to me since people seem to love to have nice art on their walls but they say it's too expensive. get a nice print! i think it's great that there's a contingent of people out there keeping it alive, especially since i feel like i'm joining the party (uninvited?) so late.

bringhurst's words were:

"because the Web, like the subway, is not a destination. Printing is still what type is for."

what's funny / ironic to me is that this is the exact punctuation on the page (209). although, the text before this is:

"Now that type is principally a digital commodity, printed type specimens are quickly disappearing. Yet they remain an invaluable resource. because the Web, ..."

perhaps the original quotation is not a complete thought then. either way, the grammatical error might've made this stand out but i like the statement. i should say that i don't completely agree with his sentiment though. i'm sure many people would love to see proper typography on more, if not all, websites (which i do see as digital analogues to printed matter - the web is merely the ether) but i do like the encouragement to keep on printing. i would guess that because of the inaccessibility to use nice type and apply one's preferences in support of it, bringhurst believed this to be true at the time he wrote this. maybe he still does. even apple still haven't fully gotten type right (exhibit a) and maybe that's a good thing.

crystal castles

2010-06-13T19:48:00.003-04:00

i'm not typically into techno/electronic type music but crystal castles is one duo i do like. i find it hilarious that they're named after a she-ra reference. their new album seems a bit more poppy but it's still pretty decent. i guess i'd call it a bit more ambient. anyway, check them out if haven't already. alice glass and ethan kath in moleskine.

the genius of design

2010-06-13T12:53:00.003-04:00

a great first episode of the bbc's genius of design show. check out out the first episode:

The Genius of Design ep1 from Genius of Design 1 on Vimeo.

cle

2010-06-04T02:08:00.004-04:00

lots of randomness observed while waiting at cleveland hopkins international airport. haven't been doodling as much as of late - just too much on the go. be prepared for more randomness from my trip to supplement, ha ha. actually, i need to post more inspiration type stuff too. i'll get on that soon...hopefully.

incredibox

2010-05-27T23:53:00.007-04:00

kind of illustration related but more music related: check out incredibox. it's pretty fun. http://www.incredibox.fr/

bits of cartagena

2010-05-22T01:44:00.004-04:00

i was away for a couple of weeks and during that time i got to soak up a little bit of the old city in cartagena. some drawings from when i was there. nice place - so hot! still haven't tried the columbian coffee i got but will do so soon. our tour guide, encarnacion, and statues of cervantes and india catalina in moleskine.

pseudo life drawings

2010-05-12T21:54:00.004-04:00

whoa, it's been almost a month since i last posted. i was away for two weeks though so that didn't help.

i haven't been to life drawing in ages and i'm itching to go i think. to try and circumvent that a little i've been using photos for reference. hedi slimane always has interesting ones. can't really quote pose lengths but i probably should've timed myself and stopped for fun. drawn in nice, new, red moleskine.

rejected ttc posters, volume 2

2010-04-24T00:29:00.003-04:00

i was going to do a bit about how to use the stairs but i actually saw that on the train today. ha ha! i guess they're taking a step back from showing people how to use escalators. so here's a quick substitute idea. more to come - these are fun to do.

natalia

2010-04-22T01:56:00.004-04:00

just some study fun with brush pens. kind of a fast one so the likeness isn't amazing but hey. photo by hedi slimane. natalia vodianova in moleskine.

rejected ttc posters, volume 1

2010-04-15T02:05:00.005-04:00

perhaps the toronto peoples will really only appreciate these but i'm sure people in cities with transit systems can generally relate. i'd be willing to bet that the toronto transit commission has a pretty high wtf factor compared to many other transit systems out there. i rely on them like many people in this city and i'm grateful that we even have transit system. i'm sure there are great people working for them but sometimes though, they really do irk me or plainly don't make sense. if you've seen any of their seemingly self made advertising (that seem to only appear within the confines of ttc vehicles!), you'll know what i mean. that's basically the inspiration behind these quick little anti-designs. more to come but expect a delay.

a blaffair to rememblack!

2010-04-08T02:39:00.011-04:00

i'm hoping 30 rock fans will get a bit of a kick out of this illustration. this is the first of a series of illustrated posters for which (to my limited knowledge) there aren't actually posters that have been seen on the show. although i'm not sure i can resist doing another take on who dat ninja.

i may post the process later but i will say that i decided to hand draw all the type. i hope i did the main typeface - and no i don't know its name yet - some decent justice. and yes, i meant to put "executived" there.

you can buy a print here.

basia bulat

2010-04-04T01:23:00.007-04:00

basia plays the guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukele, sax, and flute. autoharp! i really like the arrangements in her songs - so many layers to try and zero in on. i find it really funny that she cashed some student loans to record music while she was in montreal (she's originally from london). i guess when it's to record with howard bilerman, you really don't do anything other than what she did though, ha ha. basia bulat in moleskine.

23012010

2010-03-26T02:22:00.005-04:00

a couple of weeks ago i was able to finally go to life drawing for the first time in months. i was out of practice but it felt pretty good. i should probably mix up the media i use more but i still find it challenging to capture something i'm completely happy with. every once in a while i'm ok with the session. the drawings below from an earlier session occurred on such a day. life drawing at ocad, in moleskine.

one minute poses.

five and ten minute poses.

twenty minute poses. i think i'm going to break out the brush pen more.

speaking of mixing it up, i really love francis vallejo's life drawings.

his other work is, uh, ok too. check it out and you'll see what i mean. this kid's a machine and seems to really breathe through his work. check out his blog here, too.

bestiary: adélie penguin

2010-03-19T02:17:00.004-04:00

these guys live in the antarctic like other penguins. i can't believe they can dive something like one hundred seventy five metres and will swim nearly two hundreds miles to get food. talk about a trip to the grocery store. i find it interesting that they form nests in part with stones. penguins are wicked. adélie penguins in moleskine.

marieke & danny & erwin & max & eduard

2010-03-16T00:55:00.011-04:00

i really love experimental jetset's work. you need to go to their site now. i could spend days looking at their archives and i really appreciate that they actually took the time to explain their pieces. yeah, i know - sometimes if you have to explain the concept it may not be as good. i can appreciate that. i tend to disagree with that notion though. mostly because i'm probably too daft to fully understand things sometimes, ha ha. but hey, some took shannon's channel coding theorem at face value and some wanted to see the proof behind it.

anyway, the idea for the poster is my little homage to these talented dutch folks. they conceived this idea years ago and it's been redone several times over. i did a little bit of checking and didn't see a radiohead version. i thought that that was blasphemy. so i made my own. rather than completely recycling the idea, i thought i'd add a little twist to signify the brotherly connection between members of the band. at the same, i thought i'd try and acknowledge a pair of swiss fellows who helped make jetset's poster possible as well.

version three

2010-03-09T19:41:00.005-05:00

redesigned my website. give her a gander if you so please. and thanks.

subway doodles 2

2010-03-05T02:13:00.005-05:00

soodles? sudles? brutal. a few more commuter drawings.

perspective

2010-02-27T18:04:00.004-05:00

i started drawing an american bison for this bestiary of mine and started with a photo that i thought had an interesting perspective to start with. i'm trying to keep up with experiments while still working on my actual projects. so i took a gander at illustration friday's theme and it is, weirdly enough, perspective. i've been wanting to try taking ball point pen drawings further as the basis for an illustration instead of using brush and ink so i thought i'd give it a go.

i realised too late in this experiment that it looks a bit barren without any real sort of background. i thought about incorporating whatever symbolic imagery that bison might have in different cultures. it seems that they're mostly used as state symbols or in flags. so this is a flag of sorts, but the blue is supposed to suggest the sky.

if you can imagine yourself on the plain and you're sharing opposing perspectives with this animal, your perspective might be that this is such a magnificent animal. his disposition might suggest that his perspective might be that he doesn't like you on his land. apparently these are really dangerous animals to be around; they can outrun us and will attack if provoked. so you're being warned as well.

not sure if i really like the result but it was worth a shot. i'll probably give this a few more tries to decide once and for all. the original drawing is also below.

i'm am slowly going...

2010-02-23T17:51:00.002-05:00

...type crazy? my new ampersand cufflinks from veer. boom.

bestiary: aardvark

2010-02-23T01:36:00.008-05:00

if you've been following along at all, you might have noticed that i've been throwing animals into the mix of my drawings. i've been thinking about personal projects a lot and have been thinking about selling prints as well. the bulk of my drawings tend to end up in my sketchbooks but i was a bit taken aback when i was told that someone wanted a print of one of my doodles. the 15 nanoseconds of fame i got from booooooom seemed to garner a nice response to the drawings and illustrations i did in my sketchbooks also.

i started just drawing animals for a change. at first i did animals which i was just plainly interested in drawing and found that i loved the freedom and difference in depicting these beings. so i kept going. while the drawings are and will be scattered among many sketchbooks i'm sure, i think i'd like to put them together and make a book out of it. i did some research and it doesn't look any modern bestiaries exist? i guess they're called the internets. or wikipedia. nevertheless, i think i'd like to add an illustrated companion to all of that.

it'll be a while before i finish this but i'll try and post every animal i draw (which i hope to be every mammal, at the very least). for the most part, this will go alphabetically but i'll take requests to have some done earlier. let me know if you think you'd like one.

aardvarks!

propogate

2010-02-21T01:35:00.010-05:00

ok. i'm going to try to balance my extracurriculars with....er...extracurriculars. i miss doing stuff for myself but i don't want to neglect the things i should be focusing on too, too much. i took a gander at illustration friday's topic and it got my nerd brainwaves flowing. i tried to add a restriction to keep the work for this short too, as an exercise. my thought process is below but here's the final product.

i actually thought of two things when i brainstormed the topic: transmission/movement and fibonacci sequences. it's interesting to me that the latter occurs in things in nature, like flowers. so i thought i would just draw a flower, pop a colour in and be done with it. exhibit a:

for starters, i don't really like how centred this is, even though it's on the more asymetrical side. also, i have this inherent need to avoid the obvious so i started to second guess my choice of colour. i started to play with simple gradients and things and just couldn't decide on any one colour. so i thought magenta or something wacky and then just thought about picking a colour from good old roygbiv (grade school science for the win!).

then i realised that this spectrum is in light, which propagates. taking it further, it does so sometimes a particle and sometimes as a wave. so then i thought about sound waves. this conjured up interference patterns of sound and water waves in my head, as well as a certain joy division cover.

so to go with the flowers whose petals may or may not fibonacci their way outward, the layers you see are coloured from parts of the spectrum of light. the layers are overlapped to touch on that notion of the interference patterns. to push the wave aspect, the centres of each image are arranged to appear as a sine (or cosine if it suits your fancy) wave. i like to think there is a sense of movement in all of this too, be it from left to right or vice versa or radially from any one of the centres of the roses.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand scene. this was fun to quickly do. i like my extra-extracurriculars.

packt like sardines...

2010-02-19T18:47:00.008-05:00

...in a crushd tin box called the ttc. things are busy! about the only time i have to draw now occurs during my daily commute. i had reservations of drawing people on the subway but i've gotten over that rather quickly. it took a while to get used to the shakiness of the train. and you know, people moving. and leaving. here are a few to start.

just a skull

2010-02-08T00:02:00.004-05:00

a couple of websites and a painting have been keeping me so very occupied though i'm not complaining. i love these brush pens. so much more to be done with them. need to find the colour refills.

jd salinger

2010-01-29T02:32:00.005-05:00

a quick one. not much to say that everyone probably doesn't already know. jerome david salinger in moleskine.

more on the grainger illo

2010-01-23T02:41:00.003-05:00

i hadn't checked the bad day magazine site in a while and it was kind of nice to find this video of my favourite issue (ha). my half second occurs at 1:15.

african wild dogs

2010-01-20T01:30:00.006-05:00

pound for pound, these guys have one of the highest bite force quotients of mammalian carnivores. apparently, their hunting percentages are pretty good too. and they chirp! unfortunately, they too are endangered. they remind me of hyenas although they're apparently weaker than those scavengers, one on one. i thought wild dog was a bit of a vague name but the naming controversy for these mammals leads some to prefer to call these guys "painted hunting dogs." lycaon pictus in moleskine.

humblepied, round one

2010-01-09T01:30:00.014-05:00

i was just given this great book by bryony gomez-palacio and armin vit. among the great examples of design throughout history, i find a sample of this project. so i guess i got scooped on this concept and it probably wasn't the first time.

now let's get one thing straight. i'd never go on to assume that anything i'd ever come up with is even close to original or revolutionary. but it still feels funny when you come up with something, no matter how good or bad it really is, only to see it done already. richard holley originally fueled this re-imagined project by daniel eatock.

having seen what i (presently) think is good graphic design and looking back at my poster, i can see the things that could really be improved in my first poster (sorry lpci folks!), especially the type. i still think the concept is ok though. and as i said, it's been done. so humblepied i have been, albeit ignorantly at the time. and not for the last time i suspect, so this is round one.

exhibit a (the basis for my poster):

exhibit b (some of the holley portraits on eatock's site):

i guess on one level it's nice to know that i came up with my thing independently and in that sense it's a bit validating. but i can also see how that could be seen as a defense mechanism or worse on some level. this, like everything, is part of the learning process and i like to think (hope?) that even the most experienced and professional designers go through the same thing. it probably isn't accurate to label this round one, ha ha.

i've come to terms with the idea that there's always someone better but there's always some worse out there. i guess all one can do in the ensuing rounds is aim to land on the former side of that little credo.

20091014

2010-01-04T19:41:00.010-05:00

i haven't been drawing as much due to holiday happenings and tinkering with my website (soon to come!). to boot i will be working on two other sites and a painting so who knows when i will get time to draw. here are some life drawings at ocad from a little while back. hope you had a nice holiday and new year's.

one minute poses.

five and ten minute poses. you can skip over these ones now.

twenty minute poses.