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Illustrator

Mackenzie King Estate

Joel, Peanut and I were in Ottawa for Canada Day last weekend (saw Wills and Kate on a screen, yay!) We decided to take a jaunt over to the Mackenzie King Estate in the Parc Gatineau the next day and these “ruins” were on the property away from the house. Mackenzie King thought it would be fun to salvage various pieces of old houses from around Ottawa and leave them on his property as ruins. A nice place for contemplation, methinks, but not a night because that would just be spooky.

We would have sketched longer but we had forgotten to bring stools with us and therefore had to sit on stones, which hurt our bums. Note to self: always have camp stools handy in the car!

Part of a "ruined" window

Save the Sudbury Watertowers Art Show

Joel and I (but mostly Joel) organized an art show at the local Fromagerie to save the Sudbury watertowers, which were slated for demolition…but now are saved!

We don’t expect anyone to give Joel credit for pretty much raising awareness in a city that doesn’t give a sh*t about most things cultural, but I want to put it on record that Joel is basically the reason these watertowers  were saved, by keeping the issue in the local media.

Just goes to show, blogs go a long way in small places. Read more about it at his Save the Sudbury Watertowers blog.

My watertower sketch (which I drew plein air about a year ago) went up in the show beside Joel’s. We were sitting in the same spot, so the sketches are pretty similar, the only difference being that mine has a bit of colour in it.

 

Joel and my save-the-date

Joel illustrated our letterpress save-the-date to match his proposal book so the theme was red coral (like my ring), diving bells and turtles. And since we are great believers in killing two birds with one stone, he also used the graphic as a promo for his illustration.

 Three colours printed by moi on Crane Lettra, 140 lbs pearl white. 5×7.

The turtle shell even took on a concave shape during printing!

x-posted from Papillon Press’ blog

New year, new website

Nearly every year I re-do my website, and this is the best one yet! I’ve really scaled things down since the last one, which makes it so much easier to upload new content. I’ve scaled back on the illustration side as well; this year I will be concentrating mostly on drawing than painting.  I’m usually pretty terrible at blogging, but this year one of my resolutions is to keep this blog (and my Papillon Press blog) updated regularly.

First piece of the new year is entitled Midnight Run.