I meant to upload this awhile ago…I was hired by AGF Machining Solutions to create a work similar to my Call of Duty illustration that was to be a gift for their client Kriss USA.  The painting had to showcase the firearm that AGF manufactures parts for, the Vector CRB.  I was told they used these in the new Total Recall movie and the Resident Evil movies which is kinda neat.  I think it made an appearance in The Avengers too.  It’s funny, I never initially thought my soft painting style would be suited to military stuff but I gotta admit all the details associated with that kind of thing are really fun to paint.(…And being a freelancer, a job’s a job! Ha ha). I think I may do more in the future but I’d like to try being a little more creative/interpretive with it than this.  Still, here’s the piece… and thanks to AGF for being such a friendly and accommodating client!

New work!  Wanted it to be a finished work for New Years but oh well.  Not sure whether its even done yet but I’ve arrived at this for now and I’m going to put it away for a while. Maybe If I look at in a few months I will see if it needs anything more.  For now I hope you like:)

Last week I went to Montreal and I attended the Canadian Children’s Book Association’s show and auction Take Home an Original at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.  This was a fundraising auction for which I donated an illustration from the Book Big and Small, Room for All.  It was neat, I’d never been to a live auction before- they had the little hammer and everything! There I met illustrator Melinda Josie http://melindajosie.com/home.html who was also a participant and extremely lovely.  She was there with her husband Chris Buchan who is an artist as well and who studied illustration at Sheridan the same year I did.  My fav part of the night? Claude Cormier’s giant wall of stuffed animals!  Go visit the Museum’s new children’s wing to see.  Here are some blurry pics of the event.

The auction…

The show….

The food! So delicious…

My donation…

So what I’ve been doing for the last month is below.  This was supposed to be a quick job for a very nice gentleman who commissioned a portrait of his daughter and her older sisters.  For whatever reason this picture would not come together for me and took me the better part of September to finish it.  I finished the painting once but then started a new one because I didn’t like it.  Although this one is better, I think I’d still start again if I wasn’t under time constraints.
Usually work like this is a breeze, but sometimes I can’t seem to make it right and it really takes the wind out of my sails.  Now that this is done though, I only have one other small job to finish and then I get to work on something I’ve had in my head for awhile…here’s a little sketch/sneak peek:)

I will be exhibiting/selling some art prints at this year’s Fan Expo (comic con) which takes place here in Toronto at the end of august.  For this event I’m creating a few new pieces inspired by video games and other awesome nerdish things.  Below is my first go—something which may or may not appeal to everybody but considering that what seems like half the planet is playing these games I was inspired.  I actually really enjoyed painting all the military details and using a very grimy, desaturated colour scheme.  My reference for the buildings in the background came from my recent trip to Granada in Nicaragua, a country that has seen its own share of bullets.  For those who want to know, the painting was executed using my usual combination of watercolour and pencil on paper. I used watered-down acrylic for the splatters.

I just recently finished a rough for an illustration and I thought I’d share it.  It’s an idea for a project that I hope to get the chance to work on.  It will be a finished painting someday!  You can click on the pic to see some more detail.

I’ve been playing the Shadow of the Colossus and ICO port for the ps3.  This illustration is a gift for someone and will be a finished painting eventually. This drawing was supposed to be a more simple line drawing, just to map out the composition more precisely after the initial thumbnail (I didn’t post the thumbnail because my thumbnails are very messy scribbles that I’m pretty sure only I can make out as a drawing of anything), but I had some difficulty visualizing the details of the colossus without any values.  I think it was because I want the piece to feel soft and smudgy and trying to realize it first in line wasn’t going to be enough when it came time to paint i.e. watercolour isn’t the most forgiving of mediums so in order to paint with confidence in the final I ended up having to work out all the values in pencil first.  Long story short, there will be a bit of a wait for the final painting as this took more time then expected and I have to move onto some other things first.  Also, I’m kinda tired of looking at it.

I finally finished my christmas card for 2011!  Stating the (I hope) obvious, it’s a partridge in a pear tree. Work has been killing me for the entire month of December so I totally procrastinated on this one.  Time to mail these babies out! Hopefully they will get to people at least before New Year’s.  In the meantime, a very happy christmas to everyone and see you all in 2012. (Can you believe it’s 2012?)

I just recently found out a that my colleague and all around lovely person Melissa Reeve just had a baby.  In celebration of this is Pod Baby.  This is not her baby but keeping in the theme of babies and the fact that everyone I know seems to be having them I was inspired. Maybe I’ll do a whole slew of pod babies… dunno yet. Maybe it’s a little too Anne Geddes for me. But this little guy is pretty cute!