New Work

Tyrannosaurus Rex | Personal Work

Creating a series of Big Lizard paintings has been on my list of personal projects for a long time. Due in no small part to my years hanging around the museum as a kid or the posters that wrapped my bedroom walls growing up. To kick things off I started with the tyrannosaurus because he's the king, and easily the most famous. Check out Portfolio 2 for a larger image of the Tyrannosaurus and expect more dinos in the coming months.



Tyrannosaurus Rex | Process & Detail | acrylic paint on illustration board ~12 x 18"

Wedding Invitations

To Have and to Hold | Private Commission

The approach I took to this wedding invitation was inspired by the venue Jamie and Talia had chosen for their big day. The Eglinton Grand is an old theater in Toronto that's been converted into an event hall and restored to its original 1937 grandeur. We thought it would be fun to imitate the sensibilities of a romantic movie poster from the same period.




To Have and to Hold | Process & Detail | ink on watercolour paper 10 x 15"

At the outset I had intended the physical art to be rendered exclusively in ink wash, but after over-working Talia's hair I introduced white acrylic. Once I'd completed the black and white painting I brought it into Photoshop where I colourized the image. This is a technique I've found quite successful at capturing a Technicolor look while retaining the brushstrokes and textures of my painting. With the rendering already done in paint this method of colouring is pretty quick.
The typography on the posters of the 1930's is sometimes the most complex part, often using as many as six different typefaces in a short stack of text. For this I created some original hand lettering and modified existing fonts in other places. Some informational text has been omitted for web.