Recent Studies, Recent Art

Sorry for the lack of blog updates these past months! I decided early this year to focus my efforts on learning and creating more artwork to add to my portfolio, stores and Instagram pages. I’ve also been helping out an animator with an informational video on a tight deadline. I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming post.

In order to produce more personal work, I began to set some time limits for myself for each piece and, as a result, I became much more efficient and produced more work in a few months than I did in an entire year. I realized a lot of what slowed me down in the past was overthinking things. Don’t get me wrong, I occasionally still do but I’ve been trying my best to push past it. I totally get that ubiquitous t-shirt phrase, Don’t Overthink It.

Letting go to draw whatever came to mind and trying out whatever style was also very freeing—I was coming up with ideas far more often. Too often, sometimes, but that’s a good thing, right? My main struggle these days is I have trouble trying to stick to a single subject matter and style because I love to explore. It would be nice to be recognized for my style. I’m not sure if I have one yet. Maybe one day.

Because I’m constantly trying to increase my knowledge of technique, I followed some tips I picked up from my Schoolism classes and I started to do more light studies, studies of animals, action poses and backgrounds. I began to notice improvement to my finished pieces which I’ll save for another post. I felt like I was able to produce them a little more easily than I had in the past. Although I was pleased at how some of them turned out I know there will always be room for growth. I did start to think: Wow, did I really do that? There was a time when I would make numerous studies and still feel like I wasn’t advancing. I was embarrassed to share them so often I didn’t. To me they weren’t good enough—I made the mistake of comparing myself to others. We are often hardest on ourselves, right? I’ve since changed my perspective and instead try to learn from those artists I admire. Below are some of the studies I’ve been doing this year.

Light Studies:


Exploration of Shapes, Expressions and Line of Action :

Landscape Studies From Photos and Paintings:

Animal Studies:

Thanks for looking!

Character Designs for a Comic

I've been busy working on a few projects in development but this is something I can share. My friend, Robert Iveniuk asked me to help him pitch a short comic called The Ruins with animals as the main characters. He knows my soft spot. 

Below are my interpretations of his characters: Kirby, a Schnauzer; Penny, a Beagle; and Gordon, an adorable Chow Chow, along with a group of hungry raccoons they encounter. I understand that the story is to be in black and white but I couldn't help but want to see what they would look like in colour. 

Update: Although our pitch did not make the final cut, (there were a large volume of submissions to the publisher) this doesn't necessarily mean that we won't do something with this in the future. In the meanwhile, I have been busy with other projects and commissions. I hope to share some of them soon. 

Schoolism - Foundation Studies Course - Weeks 4 and 5

I know that I'm a little behind on this post due to some personal and client projects that came up but below are my 2 assignments for week 4 on 'Composition' with Thomas Fluharty.

I took a little longer on my second assignment for week 4 trying to get the lighting, poses and expressions right. For both assignments, we were given photos to use as reference and encouraged to include as many as possible using all the tools we learned from this course to create a pleasing composition.  For my first assignment, I used all 4 of the provided images (dog, cat, window and flowers). For my last assignment, I used 4 out of the 5 images because I felt that a park bench wasn't necessary to the story of daredevil dogs and it would end up being too busy for the shot. I was thinking that I may do a coloured version later and possibly make a print of it.

Week 5 was an overview of gesture drawing with a suggestion to continue studies by taking Alex Woo's class on gesture drawing. I wholeheartedly agree and have already switched to his class. It's a great tool to help you see things in a new way and to keep poses from looking stiff. I will be posting more on that soon.