Did this a while back as a quick overnight fix for a magazine. Usually I’m not one for using Photoshop filters but for once it actually worked out pretty well. The article was about a indie punk band called Trigger Effect, and was mainly talking about how they tended to do a lot of their business independently, although they disliked the being associated with the term DIY. For visual sake though, I thought the 80′s DIY punk aesthetic made sense for the article.

I basically ran a stamp filter over a photo of the band and cobbled their heads together to make the record cover. Was trying to get it to look like a grainy black and white photocopy – actually tried drawing it but it looked too clean. All in all  I thought the experiment worked out pretty nicely.

This was done for the June cover of Lucid Media magazine. The focus of the issue is the North by North East (NXNE) music festival, which is a big free music bash in Toronto that features a huge array of up and coming bands, as well as a few big names.

The festival’s mascot is the bunny that you see on the yellow wristband. I was hoping to create something that was eye catching and keeping with the spirit of the festival without being too overtly like a music poster. The editor wanted to try to tie in the multi faceted aspects of the festival (apart from the music, it also has a film and interactive/ conference portion). I worked the other elements into the tattoo on the main hand.

The piece is probably more inspired by the game, Rockband than the festival itself. I really have no idea if people still wave lighters around at concerts. But heck, it was cool when they did…

My husband is an avid gamer and game reviewer. One of his passions is tackling the matter of narrative in games by examining their current state in the medium, and anticipating their development. This piece was done to accompany one such feature article in C&G Monthly, a Canadian pop culture magazine focusing on comics and video games.

Being married to someone who is passionate about games, it’s inevitable I suppose that I share some of his love for them. I’ll admit I’m much more of a backseat gamer than one that actually plays games, mostly because I don’t have the reflexes for many games and I tend to panic under the time-sensitive stresses that are core to the gameplay of most games. But I do enjoy watching the games that we buy, in  particular the ones that have good storylines.

Rough concepts for the illustration

To me, the current attitudes towards stories in games is similar to the attitude people had towards comics when I was growing up. Comics were viewed as this sub-par combination of badly drawn pictures and bland, 2-dimensional stories for children and no-too-bright adults. In recent years, thanks to successful movie adaptations (or so i think), the public has come to accept that it is possible to tell a deep, meaningful and engaging story through comics, and at some level  it’s more socially acceptable now. Games, in turn, have moved in to fill the spot vacated by comics to being the pariahs of  storytelling.

Which is a darn shame because while some games still have bad stories, there are some stories to be enjoyed in the still-developing medium.  Stories in games are uniquely experienced, both as gamer and observer, and the bottom line is that it’s a bit unfair for people to dismiss the stories or to simply say that there is no story to be had.

So, when my husband said he was doing a piece about narrative in games, I wanted to cook up something that helped illustrate the article in a nutshell, in a way that looked hopefully more mature and intelligent. It’s not much, but I hope that combining a thoughtful essay with a picture that isn’t just space marine/bikini warrior will help to eventually get people to realize the same thing they did about comics – that both comics and games don’t need to be stupid entertainment for kids, and that you can get some good stories out of both.

Went to the Toronto Zoo a couple of weeks ago with some friends, and we had a great day just drawing the animals. It was rather so most of the animals seemed to be rather inactive, which made it easier for us to draw them. Below are more sketches of various critters: (more…)

Finally had some time to do up the new batch of thank you cards for my clients. Will send them out tomorrow, hopefully.

Did this recently for Lucid Media. It’s the cover for the issue featuring Canadian director Atom Egoyan. The illustration is  portrait of him, with characters from his various movies woven into his hair. the watermark background is based off Armenian patterns in recognition of his heritage.

Here’s the work as it appeared (the inner black and white spot was another cover concept that we decided to use for the article instead):

Here were the roughs I did. I normally don’t do color roughs, but decided to for this one:

Finally had some time yesterday to work on something not work related. Since God of War 3 is out today, I thought this was a suitable celebration.  Technically the image should be flipped to accommodate Kratos’ (the dude in the white circle) red tattoos on the other arm. I decided to make the color scheme orange instead of red, since  a lot of art based off the game features red and black. Orange seemed like something high energy which is something I wanted to emphasize over the violence and blood apparent in the game.

Top is final color work, bottom is the sketch on 8.5×11 paper.

I decided that this year, I was going to send clients something to thank them for their business once projects were wrapped. I was thinking about doing a printed card, but the idea of sending the same card to a client more than once didn’t seem nice, and I didn’t want to have several different designs lying about the house. I was also thinking of a Print Gocco thing but it’s an expensive little thing that is also pretty tedious if you’re just making one card.

Then I remembered that they sold little DIY cards at the art store and thought ‘why don’t I just paint cards for them?’. It’s great – my clients will get a little piece of real art, and I don’t have to worry about anyone getting a repeat design. And I’ve been meaning to paint more anyway, so it’s a nice way to sneak in a bit of painting now and then!

So here are the first two I’ve done that will be going out soon. The inks were done with a brush pen, with watercolors for color.

Did this for the band Ideosphere for their album Black Hole Transmissions. The image is based on the idea of the ideosphere (look it up on Wikipedia).  The album, which has some fantastic sounding nu-metal progressive rock licks, is currently available for download on Bandcamp.

This was done for an art book collecting various artists’ impressions of their favorite video game. My piece is derived from Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (or Lucifer’s Call as it was known in the UK). The premise of the game is that the world has ended and the sole survivors, a group of teens, are left to deal with the demons that now walk the Earth.  Your main character, one of the teens who himself has inherited some esoteric power, wades through the confusion of the game, battling and collecting monsters as he goes. It’s a bit like Pokemon as interpreted by Lars von Trier…