This summer has been life changing for me.

I’m not even sure where to begin. I’m sure I’m already forgetting some things, but here’s a list of:

Happy Career-ish Things That Happened This Summer!

Met Camilla d’Errico at FanExpo! She is one of my fave artists and she’s inspired me since my senior year of high school. I may have possibly creeped her out with awkward fangirlish vibes. But she was super nice!

Joined Cloudscape Comics and the Vancouver SkyTrain Sketch Group and had plenty of fun & interesting times!

Participated in my first art show with Cloudscape!

It was such a cool experience seeing numerous strangers young and old looking at my work. (I politely asked these folks if I could take their picture, hee!)

Dedy brought me flowers! Hnnnng! <3

Had an awesome time working at Kibooco this summer! Go team!

Learn a bit about Kibooco and see me draw and jump and do things in this sweet video:

So sad I won’t be seeing them on a daily basis this semester! ;__;

Squishing heads with founders Molly and Earl.

Completed character designs, illustrations, various graphics and designy stuff for Kibooco:

Illustrated and published my first book! Which you can get for free here! Yay!

Got gift art from a 5-year-old. Aww!!

;-; <3 Weep.

Through all of the Kibooco publicity (!!), me and/or my work (tiny snippets in the video and screenshots at least) have appeared in numerous places such as VancouverSun.com, the IndieGoGo newsletter & blog, TechVibes, Tech Cocktail and Village Gamer.

(In the above pic, I did the pirate – the background illustration of the island is by author/illustrator Elke Weiss.)

Made the SFU SIAT front page twice! (Once for FLOCK, once for Kibooco).

Also had my work on the Always facebook page by riding on Dedy‘s fame! :D

Completed some super fun character designs and illustrations as part of my freelance endeavors:

Began negotiations for a character licensing contract!

Got my first BUSINESS CARDS! (Something I’ve been meaning to do but put off forever! But I has them now!)

Learned so much about business and totally leveled up in that area!

Made my first $3 of passive income from my illustration work. (Small, but a solid start. More on this later hopefully!)

Painted something with actual paint for the first time in forever. Behold my mastery of real media (not really):

(Okay, so it’s not exactly hyperrealism, but, um….. rainbow tailed unicorn fish?)

Painting in bed. Genius.

Did an awesome photos-for-art trade with Jenni! These are just some of the photos Jenni took of me while we were adventuring around Vancouver (she is so talented!) I still need to figure out where & how I am going to use all of these. I just haven’t had time to put them up!

Whoosh!

“Why, hello up there!”

This is what I made for her in return, I was going for a storybook feel:

Sorry for keeping all of this from you until the end of the summer… I know, it’s inexcusable!

On a personal level, some other things I did this summer: saw and caught up with Heather! Vegan spa party with Jenni! Tried Ethiopian, Sri Lankan and Lebanese food! Got interested in actually doing stuff with my hair involving pins and braids! And plenty more.

Coming up:

This semester I’m taking 3 classes – Intro to Game Design (with my beloved! <3), Speculative Design (the entire class is gamified, we have ‘puzzles’ instead of quizzes and ‘EXP’ instead of marks), and Capstone (independent graduation project where I’ll be making some sort of interactive visual narrative thingamajiggy of my own conception).

I have three more semesters until I graduate and become a Real Adult. WHOA! It’s sort of scary, but I think I’m ready. Bring it on, world!

I have super exciting news!!

If you’ve been following my blog you’ve probably heard me mention my comic FLOCK a number of times. Well, it’s going to be in an art gallery! And you should totally come see it!

What is FLOCK? It’s the story of four friends on a camping trip, and how friendships are tested when you start to grow up.

It’s also an exploration of what space can mean in comics. It follows a branching pattern, where the readable paths are arranged in the actual landscape of the forest. You can ‘listen in’ on characters talking about each other behind their backs when they’ve split up.

Not only that, but it’s been printed at SIX. FEET. WIDE. So it’s longer than I am tall. Though I’ve showed this at different events (on laptops, tablets and projectors) this will be the first time anyone has seen it in this format – to be honest, I never really imagined printing it.

The show was only meant to include comic pages, but since FLOCK is one long unbroken story, there was no natural place to chop it up… so the curator is allowing me to show the entire thing in all its glory. I’m pretty sure mine must be the biggest piece in the show.

(I won’t claim to be the best, but I can say I’m the biggest, hohohoho.)

The event is also doubling as the book launch of Cloudscape’s newest book, Giants on Main Street. I don’t have anything in the anthology, but maybe someday!

If you’re in the Vancouver area, you should totally come see it, hang out with me, and see the work of a host of other awesome local comic artists.

It’s at:

The Cultch (1895 Venables Street Vancouver, BC)
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
6:00pm until 8:00pm

Check out the facebook event too and click ‘Join’.

See you there!

I have been working lots of 12 hour days lately. I wake up at 6 am. :D But it’s pretty much all stuff I WANT to do!

Things of interest:

• Doing more illustrations for The Period Blog which is awesomeness.
• I have a character design job coming up which is SUPER EXCITING!
• I have finally drafted my first script for my All-Canadian Heroes comics anthology and have gotten two people to look at it and give me feedback already (thanks Bevan and Jonathon!). While I’m not satisfied with it yet, it’s way better structured than anything I’ve written before and I already know of ways I can improve upon it!
• I might get to spend two semesters doing an (interactive) graphic novel project, for credits. Sweet.
• I’m learning so much about business lately and it’s blowing my mind. I’m so stoked about what I’m going to achieve in the next few years.

And here’s some of the illustration I’ve been doing at my day job!

It’s way different from the stuff I normally do. In fact, almost the opposite! I’ve been asked to make art assets that mimic/fit with the style of another artist, whose work uses simple/geometrical/symmetrical shapes, flatness/unrealistic perspective, no lines, and tons of bright colours/smooth gradients. On top of that… backgrounds! Environments!! … Pretty much the opposite of me!

On the upside, I’m getting tons of practice with Illustrator (the pen tool is my new best friend) and colour. Working in new styles lets me see things in new ways. If you have core drawing skills and experience in applying graphic design principles, then you should be able to understand “how images work” and be able to create work in any style once you analyze it.

Candy store! (“I’ll take you to the candy shop~”)

Magic castle!! Components of the castle itself were created by the other artist, but rearranged by me.

Far away planet! (I love how this one came out!)

Tree fort! (I had to try out like four methods of drawing the branches before they looked like branches.) P.S., the house and the platform on the left and the ladders were created by the other artist.

Character design progression! The characters started out more detailed and 3D-ish, but we eventually decided to go in another direction and make them flattened, simple and stiff, like paper dolls. They still need some tweaking (especially that penguin… hahaha).

I got this far with the puppy’s pose sheet before we decided to change directions (beware, intense adorableness!):

So many puppies!!

Lastly, a unicorn:

<3

For the longest time with my drawing, first I was only focused on shape. Then I added form and line as areas of scrutiny. Recently I’ve been inspired to try playing with texture, pattern and colour!

(It’s a snabbit.)

I’ve finished my first two weeks at Kibooco, the kids’ book company! It’s so awesome I can barely believe it. My job is perfect for me in so many ways, and not only do I get to draw unicorns, princesses and puppies on the job, but I’m learning SO MUCH just from being there! Here’s some of the stuff I’ve been drawing at work:

Working on some character designs for an upcoming interactive story book. …. Yes, the last character is a peanut. I’m thinking of giving him shuttershades.

Illustrations for an alphabet book! D is for Dinosaur, U is for Unicorn, and Y is for Yeti. Hooray cryptozoology!

More illustrations and ideas for stickers/stamps.

Studies and initial explorations for the puppy character.

Early explorations for a made-up character called a Ploof. (Can you believe this is my dayjob?! What what. Fantastic.)

Now, for some other work:

I finished this book cover! The project has been in the works for quite a while, but now it’s DONE! I’m going to be making a blog post on the process I used to design it. I think this is my best work so far!

Updated the illustration portfolio. Notable additions include the above book cover, a collection of my life drawings from the Vancouver SkyTrain Sketch Group and a collection of character sketches.

As part of my turning legal initiative, a few weeks ago I finally purchased licenses for the software I use to do my art and design work. It’s hard to feel like a real pro when you’re using pirated software. It’s a mindset thing. I now own licenses for Paint Tool Sai and Adobe CS6 Master Collection Student Edition! It was kind of nervewracking to spend that much money on Adobe, but I think it’s more than fair considering I’ve been using their software for years and years and years.

I’m now an official member of Cloudscape! I started going to the meetings and I’m starting to get into the groove of it. They recently raised the money to print their latest anthology, Giants of Main Street. Can’t wait to read it! I’m working on a character submission for a project a member is running on the topic of Canadian heroes. I’ve been learning so much lately about story and character and theme and I’m trying to apply all of that into my character/story creation, so I’m struggling a bit with settling on an idea I love, but hopefully will soon.

Also… other projects on the go. Comics, books, stuff! I have big plans for the coming year! I’m taking it to the next level! WHOOHOO!

Lastly, my friend Jenni got engaged, so the logical thing to do was to become a human rainbow.

Doing some research on illustration for kids since that’s (part of?) what I’ll be doing starting next week. Loving what I’m finding! So many adorable characters, beautiful colour palettes and textures.

Even though my art usually gravitates towards the adorable, I’ve never thought about illustrating things specifically for kids before. I’ve always just drawn what appealed to me (or in some cases adjusting the style & content to what the project needs).

What are your favourite children’s books (or sites, apps, games, shows, toys)?