QWAC and Cabbagetown festival

Two of my paintings will be up (at the toronto school of art booth) at the Queen West Art Crawl and Cabbagetown festival in Toronto this sept. The Cabbagetown fest is this weekend..the 11th and 12th of september, and the QWAC is the 18th to the 20th. This makes me very happy but at the same time I'm in the midst of starting a Collections Conservation and Management degree in Peterborough so I have to race home and prep the artwork!

I'm glad these two got in to the show because they actually depict the city :)

hand sketches....

my hands, to be specific. I used to hate drawing hands but after I did these, I had a bit more confidence.. normally I'm not big on drawing from life but it's good to know you can still 'do' it.

Tree painting (ancient Oak)

A painting I'm working on based on a photo I took of an ancient oak tree from Sherwood forest in the UK a few years ago. Yes, robin hood-times tree! It was huge and I've always wanted to paint it.

It's oil, 24x30 inches..

"Of all the trees that grow so fair, / Old England to adorn, / Greater are none beneath the Sun, / Than Oak and Ash and Thorn."- Rudyard Kipling

A piece I did in the last few days.. it's been a long time since I've used a pen to sketch.

More Old Sketches.. Pre Art School

I just found these recently.. they're at least 5-8 years old, if not older. It's weird comparing how I drew then to how I draw now. Almost feel like my style was more my own then it is now, since being in school. I guess that can bring up the whole issue of the role of school in artistic development. The technical aspect has helped me hugely in terms of composition, spacing, material use and so forth but the creativity and personal side was harder to tap into. Getting pieces done in a set timeframe has always been a challenge because I don't *always* feel creative, some months there's nothing and other times it's a crazy wave of ideas within like 2 or 3 days.
The middle piece I remember doing based on a man I saw on the bus when I first moved to TO (10 years ago..holy mother) who I thought looked like a dwarf. I then drew the guy from memory and put him at a table because I couldn't remember what the bus seats looked like. I was also reading a lot of urban fantasy/Charles De Lint and Terry Windling-type books then.

Oldish sketches...

These are a bunch of sketches I did over 3 years ago which I've been meaning to turn into larger, more complete images. I don't know what medium I want to use yet..maybe something new. New territory mwahahahaha!!

The first one will definitely be a painting because I want to get the effect of the woman and the boy walking into another reality, so the scenery's going to mesh. I'll probably rotate it to so that they're walking to the right because apparently I have the tendency to make all my compositions left heavy with everyone 'looking' to the left. This is what school has taught me, thank youuuu constructive feedback.


Note the tiny man at the bottom..this is supposed to be a living mountain. The guy at the bottom is climbing.



dragon creature..



faery woman luring away a young boy, birds watching.

Paparazzi pics

These are from a Ronald McDonald House charity gala that I helped photograph in June.. l think they turned out well- though I couldn't use a lot of them because of who was in the pictures. These I could post by permission of the RMH charity people.