Ferme Mariposa Farm

Jana and I spent four days at Mariposa Farm's guest cabin in the woods. It coincided with new year's and the cold spell that hit most of Ontario.

 

Jana catching some sun and chilling with a book.

 

The warmest spot in the cabin when the wood stove was pumping out heat to its maximum capacity. That's where I sketched Jana reading.

The wood stove was our only heat source as well as our cooking source. Now I know how the Ingalls felt... well, not really.
The first two nights hit -20ºC and Jana was a gamer and would get out of bed to feed the stove in the middle of the night. The third night hit -30ºC and that's when I felt an elbow to the rib cage in the middle of the night...

Sketchbook

My first meet up with the group, Sketching Around the City. A group of us went to U of T's Hart House and drew the afternoon away.
I decided to camp out in one of their study halls and caught a group of students and their tutor cover material for a stats course.
The one thought running through my mind was, "thank god i'm no longer a student anymore! "

Sheep 2

Samurai helmet and half mask

Who let the dogs out?

Been working on this one for a while (maybe even overworked it). I'm not too sure if I should show this at the outdoor art show. Help me folks. Yea or nay?

Globe and Mail illustration

Well I finally have my first paying gig as an illustrator/artist. It was a last minute call for an image of a wedding cake that would go with an article about William and Kate's possible wedding cakes. It appears in The Globe and Mail, Canada's national paper, no less! I'm pretty stoked about it, but what really frustrated me was the missing credit in the print edition. However, my name appears in in the online version after my contact spoke to the online editor. So here is a capture of the online version (with the credit)

A special thanks to Michael Barker for passing my name to the people who needed this image.

Here's a link to the live article. I'm cake #7

1 cent gumball

I'll be in the West Queen West Art Crawl Show in September and I've been trying to come up with images that will be priced at a lower price point than my cafe drawings.

This "1 cent gumball" drawing is my first attempt at this lower priced drawing. It's done in watercolour and micron pen and I'm not too sure it should have been done in this medium. I think it would have been better painted in gouache because I was envisioning flatter, more solid colours. In addition the drawing is done on a 10x15 inch sheet and this scan really doesn't give you a true read of the final composition of the drawing.

Tel me what you think about the composition, colour and execution.

Rooster Cafe

The Rooster Cafe, my latest cafe drawing and the toughest one I've done up to this point. I knew it would be a doozy to colour when I was black lining it and it was true.

sketchbook 08/01/10

The newest addition to the Toronto's public spaces, Sugar Beach. It's be located on the old industrial lands, along the waterfront, across from the Redpath Sugar processing plant. There's still some construction to be done tot he space, but the actual beach is open to the public and was used by many today. I'm going to try to get down to this space when the tankers dock and unload their load. It'll be a great sketching opportunity!

St. Lawrence Market

I'm branching out from my coffee shop series and trying to capture a few other places in Toronto. This is the St. Lawrence MArket. A great people watching place and a lot of eye candy to sketch.
I thought I'd show the process of how one of these micron pen and watercolour drawings come to be. I've changed my process a bit and when I want to capture people I try to sketch them in with pencil quickly and then black line it.

Voulez-Vous Cafe

As I mentioned in the Good Neighbour post, anytime I invest a bit of time and energy into a drawing I remember certain conditions that surrounded me when I drew that image. For this drawing, it was the the proprietress' French accent and how she pronounced, "Vermeer". Made me slightly weak in the knees.

The Good Neighbour

Here's the Good Neighbour drawing, in part for M.B., but also I wanted to post something since it's been ages since my last one.

This image and the "Voulez-Vous Cafe" drawing were actually black lined quite a few weeks ago but I only finished colouring them yesterday. A slight burn out with the cafe drawings, but here they are. It's funny, but when I look at any drawing that I've invested some time in, I could remember exactly what was going around me when I drew it. With this one, there were two gentlemen sitting beside me talking about the nature of love. Actually it was the younger of the two men who was asking his friend what love was? Was he in love? I believe when they did leave, the younger man did think he was in love with his girlfriend. Isn't that sweet.

sketchbook 06/20/10

I didn't realize how much energy setting up two shows can drain from me. I didn't have any desire to sketch after the Sunnyside show and I took a lazy man's hiatus after that. However, now that I think about it, as my aikido teacher says, it's at those times when you don't feel like practicing, is when you should be going to practice the most. I guess I slipped on the drawing and I should have been putting down the lines in my sketchbook.

So with that said, this is my first real sketch since that time and hopefully I'll be back on track and uploading something on a daily basis.

literally, the last images I drew for the show

Naco Cafe and Gallery revisited

So a few days ago I noticed Naco Cafe redecorated their interior, namely moving their bar to accommodate a few more tables. Reason enough to sketch it again, no? Looking at it now, I think I preferred the first attempt at this space. It's unfortunate that the back of the chair in the foreground rides directly up the man's back side...live and learn.

Blondies

Blondies is a cafe during the day and club during the night. It's quite evident what it was with the disco ball and strippers pole in the back. I particularly liked the antler chandeliers.

All Things Tea

I did this drawing a few days ago and just finished colouring a few minutes ago. I had fun doing it and found out that the green tea I ordered should be steeped for two minutes in 170ºC water. Well I did just that and it tasted like… green tea. The gentleman in this image was on the first day of his job. The three hours I was there he acquitted himself well with the customers coming in. Good job!

I also continued using the minion pro typeface. Had a hell of a time eyeballing all those letters and I found that it was ok that each letter that was repeated didn't have to be identical to the previously drawn one...gives it some character.

Niche Cafe

i am still amazed at the number of indie cafes in Toronto. Niche Cafe is the latest one I have been to and they served the most amazing green tea with a coconut infusion... had it with a bit of honey... spot on!

Wagamama Cafe

Wagamama, in Japanese means "selfish". That's what Miwa Yamada's parents called her as a child. So when she was old enough she was so "wagamama" that she opened up her own cafe.

This is my sixteenth cafe drawing, and it was feeling slightly burned out, so I thought i'd take a different approach to it. I laid down some yellow ink splatter and integrated some text. Not feeling it on this one.

Lit Cafe

Lit Cafe is another fine addition to the collection of small independently run cafes in my neighbourhood. The one eye catching feature is the long bar made out of reclaimed Douglas Fir. As you could each length has been left in its rough form and combined to form a monolithic bar with a lot of character.

The bar name,"Lit", was bandies around between the owners family as they were all driving in a car and the owner said every time she drank one of her coffees she was lit up. Hence the name.