Chocolate Cartoons

I design the wrappers for a local chocolatier who has Chocoland's How Sweet chocolates, all fair trade, organic and hand-made. For her booth at the Green Living Show this weekend she asked me to draw some cartoons to display her chocolates, which were glued onto the art and framed in a shadow box. Here's the result! I think it's a super cute idea with the wacky text and all.



Inked with Pitt brushpens on watercolour paper and coloured with watercolours. Here's a close-up of my favourite panel...

I love nature...

And yet, I've often strugged with drawing wildlife like birds and trees and horses and dogs and cats... but my latest episode of Luz surprised me! I'm really happy with how this chirping bird in the bare early-spring branches turned out, with the perspective of looking down to the sidewalk and Luz's front stoop.

It's hot out! Time for some...

A 1-page comic about a sweet deal for the U.S.

My comrade Jeff Berg of the Toronto Post Carbon group has written a witty comic for me to illustrate about the sweet deal the U.S. has with Canada. Basically they have priority in getting our oil in times of shortage or crisis. Gordon Laxer of Alberta's Parkland Institute is going to discuss this in a few weeks, where we'll be handing out copies of this comic for fun.

More general info at The Coalition for a Green Economy, Green Enterprise Toronto, and The Parkland Institute. : )

Happy Holidays!

December brings many things... Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and various other celebrations I know nothing about. But December for me is Winter Solstice. When darkness peaks as the longest night of the year on the 21st, bringing the beginning of lightening back up, minute by minute each day, until the Spring Equinox when daylight and nighttime are equal.

Happy December to everyone. I hope we are lucky enough to get some snow, and maybe catch a snowflake, too.

Baking with Grandma

I just finished this piece for an assignment and thought I'd post it up. I love the subject of grandmothers and kids spending time together, it's a beautiful thing that I hope doesn't get lost in the dumbness of my generation. Personally, I grew up with my grandmother living with us, and despite the in-law tension with my mom, I would never change that aspect of my childhood! :-)

Another year, another birthday

Yeah, we can either laugh or cry at relentlessly getting a year older every twelve months... or we could go with the flow, lay back and enjoy a good cubano!

I'm 32 for another week, and in this past year I think I learned a little something, something very liberating, and that is that most of the stuff I spend my time worrying about is really really really unimportant. No, really! It is finally sinking in that we're such tiny blips in all of existence through time and space, that a lot of stuff we fret about isn't really worth our sweat. Or the paid work we devote our waking hours to might not deserve our attention at all. I am simultaneously rejecting most of what is out there in our society, while really appreciating what there is. And being way more picky about what I choose to spend my energy on, and what I choose to worry about.

I think I'm going to be late a bit more often. And maybe I'll get a tattoo. : )

"Las Amorosas" colour piece

I've been having fun with gouache, the medium I've never managed to get right, but thought I'd try it out for a colour piece for the Dear Pablo story I posted earlier. Maybe this would be a nice back cover (I picture the front cover being graphic, and if I do a series of these stories perhaps only the cover colour and title would change, as opposed to having an illustration on the covers pertaining to the story inside -- boring! predictable!).

I like hot reds, pinks and oranges next to greys and dark browns like I used in this piece.

Dear Pablo

In my mind a superhero should take care of wounded souls and show some compassion to disregarded victims of love crimes -- and truly, aren't all crimes betrayals of love? I present Las Amorosas, a trio of urban women who work as sous-chefs at Juice for Life. Their love for humanity at the personal level has given them the power to sense others' pain and help heal them through unwavering compassion. This first story shows an Amorosa attending to one such broken-hearted lad.
















Pen on paper, digital collage and photoshop.

To deaf ears

A summer ago I realized how preposterous my neighbours' behaviour was when it came to front yard care. Behaviour that included watering the interlocking brick (no lawn), presumably to clean it (instead of using a broom), and watering the garden as rain clouds were rolling in. These are a few little drawings that resulted from those observations, which I put together as photocopied little flyers and put in each neighbour's mailbox, many of which I found flying around the street later in the day. Drawn in pen and black watercolour.