First Flight for Baby - AAA Traveler Magazine

The characters were based on my own wife and daughter.

I had the pleasure of working with Pace Communications to create an illustration for this month's AAA Traveler Magazine. The article by Amity Moore is titled Hush Little Baby, Tips to make flying with young children as easy as 1-2-3.

This was a very interesting convergence since when I created this piece my wife and I had only recently returned from our very first flying experience with our 7 month old daughter. Our own experience wasn't quite as easy as 1-2-3, but we survived nonetheless.

Pictured above is an idealized account of how our trip was for the magazine piece, and pictured below is my actual wife and daughter whom the characters above are based on.

They're even more lovely in real life!

One additional note, the pattern that I used for the chairs comes courtesy of Adobe and Von Glitschka.

Sweater Be Gone!

It's been a while since I've had the chance to participate in an Illustration Friday topic, but I have a very slight lull for about a day and so I had the opportunity to do a sketch for this week's topic of "sweater". It was inspired by the fact that we've had a couple days of unseasonably warm weather, and I have the urge to run outside and shed clothing much like in the piece. Don't worry neighbors... I won't actually do it.

Once finished I'll be using this piece for a promotional email next month to celebrate spring, and as my new homepage header at The I Spot. Check back next month because I'll also post the finished product here.

Retro Pixel Background for Keep the Heat

To celebrate hitting 500,000 subscribes Alex of YouTube's Keep the Heat fame commissioned this fresh new background. It was a fun challenge since I had never created anything with this pixelated look before but I think it came out great.

Working with Alex is always a good time since he always has a fun new idea. I'm glad that I'm his go-to illustrator!

2011 Winter Wallpaper

It took a while for me to get around to this with workload, Christmas holidays, and a new baby in the house, but here it is at last, a fresh new wallpaper for 2011. If all goes well I'll have 3 more this year - one for each season. So please check back in April for the next installment.

Since Blogger limits image sizes to 1600x1000 pixels, go here if you'd like to download the full size wallpaper.

On Shelves Now!

Wow, exciting week! In one day I received copies of both Turtle Magazine and The Writer Magazine which both feature my work. The piece for Turtle was created to accompany the poem City Street by Betty L. Hass. Many thanks to Bart Rivers for the super fun assignment!

The piece for The Writer was for an article by Lynn Capehart titled The Importance of Inclusionary Writing. It's a very interesting article about how many white writers will only describe a character in terms of race if they're non-white. It's a more heady topic than I'm used to, but I think it turned out great, thanks in large part to Ron Kovatch the magazine's Senior Editor.

Illustrator of the Month

I'm exited to announce that childrensillustrators.com has chosen me to be their illustrator of the month! I consider it a big honour considering the the wealth of talented illustrators who are members of the site.

Keep the Heat Apocalypse Background

I was recently commissioned by the infamous Alex Negrete of Keep the Heat to create a new web background in celebration of hitting 300,000 subscribes. It's always a lot of fun working with Alex on these since he always has creative concepts and gives me a lot of room to play.

The Elephant in the Room

Here's a piece was completed last week. The end client is in the business of helping medical pros with their organizational systems, and the elephant refers to changes coming down the province's pipeline that nobody wants to deal with until it's too late.

Thanks to Randy at Mythographics for being fun to work with on this one. I was actually able to meet him over coffee a couple of times. It seems that it's a rare but pleasant occurrence that I can meet the people I collaborate with.

Stolley Children's Hospital Campaign

I was really happy to get this gig doing the illustration work for The Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation's new campaign. The campaign will continue with phases 2 and 3 where you'll learn what happens to Ethan.

It's a really fun project to work on, and definitely a worthy cause. Props to the crew at g[squared] for being the masterminds behind it all.

K9 Design Portraits

I was recently asked to create this trio of portraits for the crew over at K9 Design Co. I've worked with the team there before and it's always an enjoyable experience. The job was fun too, I always like the challenge of portraying real people in my simplistic style. Maybe some of you out there would like to commission a portrait?

ChickaDEE Puzzle Page

I'm happy to announce that you can find some of my work in the current edition of ChickaDEE Magazine. I was asked to create the illustrations for a puzzle page in the new reptile issue - in stores now!

I've also just finished a couple spot illustrations for ChickaDEE's sister magazine Owl, and have a piece underway for Humpty Dumpty Magazine.

I really like doing these kids magazine pieces, they're super fun.

Brave Sunterrainean Circus Mouse

Well, I actually created this as a part of Illustration Friday's "brave" theme for last week as well as for Monday Artday's theme of "circus"... also last week. So it's late on both counts. But, I feel it could also apply to this week's IF theme of "subterranean".

Keep the Heat Illustrations

I very recently created some illustrations for Alex Negrete of the Keep the Heat YouTube channel (with over a million views). The work consisted of a background for the web page, as well as some additional character illustrations for his show Klik, a show for teens and tweens where Alex riffs on celebrities and other topical stuff. I'm especially proud of the God character - he's a pretty hip looking dude. It was a fun assignment, and Alex was definitely a pleasure to work with.

Life Of Pi

This is a little late for the Illustration Friday topic of "adrift", but I'm super pleased with it so I need to share it. Anyone who's read it will instantly recognize this as coming from Yann Martel's awfully good book The Life Of Pi. I really wanted to capture the uneasy truce between the characters.

Plan B

I decided to try an experiment. For a long time I've done my best to move away from the use of line in my work and rely on colour and and contrast to separate elements. However, I was recently looking at some beautiful vector work with strong black lines and was jealous of the heavily graphic effect they had. So I thought I might go back and see if I could work with that idea a bit.

Well, it looked like crap. I think I was forcing it too much. It happened naturally with an older piece of mine, The Dude. I think the outlines work there because it's in the context of stained glass style, and because there's a lot less of them. They're also incorporated a lot better due to the texture. Anyway, you can see my revised version and I think you'll agree that it's much better. It never hurts to play around though I guess.

Got Mud?

This is both my response to the Illustration Friday theme of "muddy", as well as a kids t-shirt design for my new Zazzle store - check it out here!

New Self Portrait for 2010

I made this for something to have on the back of my promotional postcards. I toyed with the idea of just repeating whatever was on the front and just washing it out, but that didn't really add anything to the design. If I'm going to shell out for 2 sided printing, I might as well make it worthwhile and add a bit of interest, and part of promotion is selling myself as a brand so why not just blatantly sell myself?

I'm quite pleased with the end result will post my finished design once done. This image also dovetails nicely with this weeks Illustration Friday theme of "focused". So total bonus!

Clumsy

Here's my submission for the Illustration Friday theme of clumsy. I hate when people talk on their phones and drive... unless of course I'm the one doing it.

Wilderness

I was trying to figure out something to do for a promotional piece, and since I've been remiss at doing any Illustration Friday themes for a while, that's naturally where I turned. Above you'll see the result.

A nice thing about being in Edmonton is having a taste of city life with some beautiful nature pretty nearby. My wife and I took off to Jasper for some snowboarding over the holidays and we've been enough times that we're starting to take things like gorgeous mountain scenery and having to navigate around big horn sheep wandering around the road for granted. So I guess that's what this piece is about.

My first attempt at a "Making Of"

I've been wanting to try doing a "making of" video for a while, and when I heard about Screenr, I thought it was time to get off my backside and give it a shot. Screenr is pretty sweet - it's a web app so no installation is involved, and if you like you can publish right to twitter. I just downloaded my clips and edited with iMovie. I got the music from Musopen, a very good source for public domain classical music.

So, voila - I'm a filmmaker. Orson Wells ain't got nothin' on me.