Five Year Review, 2018

Pearls of Wisdom

Five years ago I made perhaps too much of a muchness of my 25th anniversary of painting (I began in 1988), but now that series of posts serves as my autobiographical origin story.

This year –my 30th anniversary– I'm not making as much of a muchness since the occasion, like my birthday, only has any real meaning for me. I did a celebratory painting (above) but there's no party, no huzzah...no big deal. I am feeling quite reflective, though (as usual, 'round this time of year), so this post will simply be a look back at the past five years. Almost everything is here; some things I've left out for various reasons, some things I'm sure I've just forgotten.

Click on the titles of each item to find out more...

––––––––[   2014   ]––––––––

To the Sound of Trumpets

Cheers!

Kodak Duaflex IV

––––––––[   2015   ]––––––––

Jetpack Mark 2

George Meanwell (Banjo)

George Meanwell (Concertina)

Trinity

My return to scale modelling.

Majtap

Long-Range Forecast

Screen-printed Mounties.

––––––––[   2016   ]––––––––

West Hill Fence Company Truck Version 2

Sid

Bunting House (PEC)

My Statuarial watercolours.

West Hill Fence Company Truck Version 1

13 more paintings in my favourite medium.

––––––––[   2017   ]––––––––

Ralph Vint

My first packaging illustrations.

Kelsey (Shade)

Kelsey (Accordion)

Reed (Underwater)

Gus Diving

I now also build architectural models.

Hat Trick

Snowblind

My first big painting collaboration.

CD Cover for a local anthology.

––––––––[   2018   ]––––––––

Eddie Murphy's car from Beverly Hills Cop.

Some more packaging illustrations.

Bata Headquarters, Don Mills

The Mcluhan Institute Logo

My sixth Lantern Festival poster.

Armistice Day Anniversary Cake

Ice Box logo.

Night at the Library poster.

Edwards Merrill

Night at the Library Poster

11" x 8.5", digital, 2018.

Some time in the late summer of 2018 I was approached to provide a poster design and illustration for an event intended to raise some funds for the expansion of the Picton Library here in Prince Edward County. Having done an ink painting of the front of the library at night as part of my County 101 series a while back, I had an immediate vision of what I thought the poster image might be: a head-on view with all the windows glowing as though something extremely bright was inside the entire building.

Illustration pre-installation.

Using a photo as reference, I built an elevation view of the library in CorelDraw, concentrating on the building and the front steps, ignoring details like the benches and trees out front. I then exported the drawing to Photoshop where I added the glowing effect. Then it went back to CorelDraw for installation into the poster design where I added the text afterward.

A digital expansion.

Of course, I only drew what I needed for the vertically-oriented poster, and I quickly realized I'd need a wider version for Facebook and other horizontally-oriented uses (like newspaper ads). I don't know why I didn't colour the grass green in this version...

Extra wide for Facebook, etc.

Adding the event's logo was a bit awkward, but that's Facebook, for you. The amount of "glow" is different because of the various iterations and back-and-forth between programs.

They even made t-shirts!

...and a gigantic version of the poster
for a storefront on Main Street!

2018 Firelight Lantern Festival Poster

2018 theme: SPACE.

This year is the sixth Firelight Lantern Festival here in lovely Picton, Ontario, and I'm happy to continue the motif of silhouettes of people on parade with their lanterns changing each year to reflect the current theme (here are the previous five posters). As with the others, this is a combination of ink and digital illustration.

Even though there are probably less than a dozen examples of my extreme love of science fiction and real space exploration in my paintings, this affinity is clearly represented in many of my scale models.

2014 Lantern Fest theme: AIR.

This year I'll be once again strapping into the Mark 2 jetpack I built a few years ago...

Upgraded.

The Mark 2 was created in time for Kingston's Skeleton Park Arts Festival in 2015 and used the same fabric flames as the Mark 1, but everything else was built from scratch.

Flight mode in Kingston.