I drew another heart last week just as the previous one sold from my Etsy shop. I don’t love it as much as the geometric version, but I wanted to see how my organic doodles would work as a heart.
The drawing is done in white gel pen on a piece of 8.5″ x 11″ red card stock. It is available for purchase through my Etsy shop.
If you happen to be in Toronto this week go visit Vancouver Outside the Box at 1082 Queen Street West. This is a window installation featuring work by a collection of work by Vancouver artists (including me), and is curated by Dear Human.
Here’s a photo Dear Human shared on instagram yesterday. It’ll be our only chance to see it because none of us will be in Toronto ourselves.
The display is part of the Toronto Design Offside Festival and continues until Sunday January 25th. You can view my work in the display in more detail by taking a look at the blog posts I wrote about the work in December. Read them here and here.
I did this quick gel pen drawing as a diversion from the large paper cut installation I’ve been working on since last week. I need a change of focus and had been dying to do a bit of drawing. While I don’t love Valentine’s Day, I do love creating artwork with hearts. Yes, I know it’s cheesy.
The drawing is listed for sale in my Etsy shop. It would make a lovely gift for your favourite valentine every day of the year.
Leading up to Christmas I decided to go on a little bender of card making. I’ve had a pack of blank white cards for years just sitting in my supplies waiting to be made into something lovely. I went at a few of them with metallic gel pens and made the abstract series of cards pictured here.
I gave most of them away to friends for Christmas, but these are like small sketches of larger pieces I would like to do when I get a moment.
This is one of those ideas I’ve had on my mind for a few years and only now have I found the opportunity to work on. I want to make large paper cut work but I’ve held back because of the logistics of how to do it when the project is larger than both my work surface and my studio. The paper I work on when I cut is in constant motion and rotation, and when the paper is large I’m not sure how to do this without damage.
With this project I decided to use the roll of tyvek left over from an installation I made a few years ago. I’d started cutting a design into the roll early last year and never went back to it because I didn’t have a good plan. But this time I decided to cut the width of the tyvek in half but keep the length, and also roughly plan out the design.
I’ve divided the tyvek into five sections and sketched out rough guidelines on each one. I’m using triangles rather than my favourite crescent shape because it lends itself better to working large. This is the progress I made on the project so far, which is about three of the seven feet.
I had Boris take a photo of me holding up the roll to demonstrate the size of this work. I’m enjoying working on this thing because I like the challenge. Progress is going much faster than I’d thought it would, which is terrific because I have many other things to work on once this is complete.
This is a lot of photos of me in one blog post but I wanted to put the twelve images together in one place to acknowledge the completion of the series. It was one of the creative things I accomplished in 2014 that I am not particularly proud of because most of these are not good work. I love three of these, and the rest are meh because they were done out of obligation to meeting the goal.
January – A Chaos of Paper Scraps
February – Arranging Constellations
March – Blending in or Standing Out
April – Things on my Mind
May – Nature’s Embrace
June – Cutting Away
July – Feeling Silly
August – In Bloom
September – Living in Colour
October – Finger Mask
November – Hibernation
December – Red Portrait
I miss photography and being good at it. The end of this project has me considering whether or not to have a new photo-based project to work on this year just to feed the image making part of my brain.
The weather was sunny, beautiful and cold during the week we were on Bowen Island for Christmas. I walked in the forest every day, and took many photos.
Walking the city streets every day seems pretty dull compared to walking in the forest on Bowen.
I had big plans for my December self portrait of an elaborate set involving paper wings and creative photoshop manipulations. But when it came time to shoot something I chose to keep it simple and just get her done.
I decided this final portrait needed to be red, which is my favourite colour, and I put on my best red hat, a giant red and black winter scarf, and found red fabric for the background.
I’m so glad to be done with this series. Working on it felt tedious. I’ve come to realize I don’t enjoy shooting self portraits the way I did in the past, and I’m okay with that.
I enjoy looking back through the year end review blog posts from previous years because it reminds me of things I’d forgotten about. I think all of the posts are filled with photos of nature and artwork, and this year is no exception.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
May 2015 be a good one for us all!
May all your holiday dreams come true. Relax and enjoy time with your family and friends, and I’ll see you in the new year.