I was asked by John over at one of my favourite blogs Super Punch if I would be interested in contributing a tarot card to a deck he’s putting together in celebration of his blog’s third anniversary. Here’s my take on the King Of Coins. It doesn’t really show up in the scan but all the gold is actually shiny gold paint!

Here’s a bit of the process behind this painting. Starting clockwise from top left:

I do messy sketches of an idea first in my sketchbook. Then I usually blow up whatever sketch I’ve decided to go with to use as a guide for refined pencils. Once I’m happy with the drawing I transfer it onto watercolour paper with the aide of a light table. Using removable tape I’ll section off the painting so when I’m finished I can remove it to get a nice clean border to the piece. Then I get to the painting! I try to work back to front. While acryla gouache paint layers really well, sometimes it can be annoying to build up a lighter colour over dark, so I try to work so I have to do that as little as possible.

The bottom right is a scan of the blown up sketch that I use to test paint on to see if I like the colours or not and how they all look together.

You can check out more of the cards in the deck over here!

“Dressed To Impress”

“Dracula”, “Robo Dracula”, “Milkman”, and “Were Milkman”

So this morning I woke up with Poison stuck in my head and it reminded me about how rad Alice Cooper is. So here’s a quick warm up painting I did today!

Getting some promo postcards printed of this piece! These guys are brothers named Nat and Tor and they don’t seem to agree on a lot of things. I’ve been having so much fun sketching those two lately!

Earlier this week I had a Sheridan student come visit me as part of her summer co-op to see my work place and ask me some questions about what it was like graduating and starting up a career in illustration. I also did a quick painting demo for her since she was interested in seeing how I go about creating a painting from start to finish. This unhappy smoking guy was the result! Thanks again to Amy for taking the time to come and visit me. I hope it was a useful experience for you!

Took a break from doing some work yesterday to make this little thing. I was thinking about how four or five years ago I was really into collage and it seemed like that was primarily where my illustrations were headed. Interesting how things can change over time!

I did this comic about the Legend Of Zelda’s title character Link for Lifemeter a couple months ago! You can click on them to check out larger versions

This show looks like it’s shaping up to be pretty rad. Have you seen Heidi’s plush frozen Luke and Tauntaun? Or Yummy Pancake’s plush Wookie Cookies?