My Blood is Young .. Or so says Applied Arts (“Canada’s Visual Communications Magazine”)! I’m excited to announce that I’m in June’s issue, which features their 2013 photography and illustration awards winners. The whole issue is basically delicious eye candy.

You can find my self-directed editorial piece, “The Good News Bias”, in the “Young Blood” section, a category dedicated to illustrators and photographers with less than 3 years industry experience. Thanks Applied Arts!

3x3 Magazine’s Student Annual is out at last! It’s issue #20, and it makes for some very nice browsing. There are tonnes of different techniques and styles represented (from the not so interesting to the jealousy inducing, at least for me), so if you want a nice looking publication that shows what’s going on in contemporary illustration, you should definitely consider picking it up!

The cover (left) is by Jonathan Bartlett, the issue’s featured illustrator. You can find me in the Student Show section on page 154, sharing some real estate with the work of Julianna Brion (whose work I very much enjoy).

Adele’s “Skyfall” song has gotten a lot of attention over the past few months. But, for a new portrait piece, I decided to look into the many other Bond songstresses from over the years. I came upon Shirley Bassey, who has performed the most Bond songs of anyone ever! This piece is based on her performance of “Diamonds are Forever” for the 1971 movie.

Sure, you can hear the song by watching the movie’s campy opening credits (clearly from before the “dark” Bond era into which we’ve all been dragged), but I instead recommend the first couple minutes of this clip, which are slightly bonkers.

I did this a fair while ago, with the intention of doing a series, but I’m not too keen on another portrait just yet and I have some other exciting projects in the works. Stay tuned!

Hello there, and a slightly belated happy new year to you all! To kick it off, I made another desktop wallpaper. I kept it pretty simple, with lots of room around it for people like me who inevitably end up having a dozen or two files and folders on their desktops.

The image is partly a reminder of the year ahead and things to look forward to (January-March is pretty much the worst part of winter here in Toronto), contemplating the swift passing of time and seasons … but it’s moooostly a subtle reminder to stop writing “2012” on things already. Form AND function!

Hurry up and get it now, it’s only good for another 354 days! Download for:

1280 x 800    |   1440 x 900    |   1680 x 1050    |   1920 x 1200    |   2560 x 1440    |   ipad

iphone   |   iphone5

My piece for “An Idea a Day,” a tumblr blog which gets illustrators to take on challenging editorial pieces.

The illustration was for this Fast Company article about an entrepreneurial endeavor by an ex-con called Collaborative Benefit. The web service hopes to connect rehabilitated, soon-to-be-released inmates with employment resources such as contacts, documentation, and internships, facilitating their difficult reintegration to the professional world.

You can check out the rest of the Ideas Illustrated here.

Remembrance Day inspired illustration / lettering.

A note — for me, the day is not at all about glorifying conflict or patriotism; rather, I think about my grandparents’ lives and the dark times they lived through by virtue of when they were born.

I’m all about questioning historical narratives and so on, but I do think that in honouring history (and its victims), we become less likely to be “doomed to repeat it,” to paraphrase ‪George Santayana‬’s famous quotation.

The Good News Bias (2012). Illustrating the human psychological tendency towards optimism: when perceiving news, we focus on the positive and filter out the negative. Read more in this article on the Guardian.

C’est l’Halloween! I did a themed desktop wallpaper for one of my favourite art/design blogs, The Fox is Black. You can download it in a tonne of sizes (including ipad, iphone, and even iphone 5) by clicking the picture above! There’s a new desktop each day this week on the site, and lots of great ones back in the archives, too.

I wanted to do a shadowy but peaceful take on the theme: fun though the potential may be, if I’m going to see something every time I open my computer, I personally don’t go for gory and macabre! I was also inspired by the skyline of the Toronto neighborhood in which I’m now living, where the narrow, smushed-together houses each have their own unique features and create an interesting, gabled silhouette.

Enjoy!

Here’s a lettering project I did a while ago for a fun site called “The Dead Words”. It is an illustrated type collection of English words which used to be common, but are now becoming forgotten or totally obsolete. I’m pretty interested in both illustrated lettering and the evolution of language (I even tried to make it the subject of my illustration thesis, in an incredibly misguided endeavor), so I wanted to add to this project pretty much as soon as I heard about it!

For this piece I took some colour cues from old atlases. I also decided to depict very outmoded, kind of romantic methods of communication: carrier pigeons and messages in bottles.

You can check out the rest of the project here, and if you feel like taking on a challenge yourself, why not contribute to the project? It was fun!

In my attempt to do more portraiture, I went back to a face I’ve illustrated before, though unsuccessfully in my opinion (it was a couple years ago and I’m a lot happier with my style now!).

I wanted to communicate the environmentalism in Margaret Atwood’s recent works, as well as how they can be read as cautionary tales of a dystopian future. I also enjoyed trying to give her a bit of a spooky, omniscient vibe befitting her prescient literary voice.