After a year and a half of happy employment, Friday was my last day of work at Good Dog Design as project manager / designer / quality analyst / occasional cookie maker. Was a lot of fun working with the great team there on all sorts of fabulous websites & games… will miss the lot of ‘em! We had a pretty eventful & stubbly Movember, and I was keen to participate myself!

Well, I’ve been a bit negligent blogging the last few weeks as I’ve been working hard on the sketches for Tom Krause’s children’s book, “The Little Boy’s Smile.” It’s a fantastic story, about a little boy who moves to Frown Town where all everyone does is frown… and you guessed it, he just doesn’t fit in because he smiles all the time! Now that the sketches are approved, I’m setting up the final illustrations and working on the first colour proof. The finals will be in acrylic on illustration board, so bright, vibrant colours. So check back, I’ll be posting my work-in-progress as I’m building up the layers of my acrylic paintings.

I had some fun working on an illustration which will be used on packaging for HBC’s Truly
brand of kettle chips (available at Zellers & other HBC stores in Canada.) Was inspired by some of the farm illustrations I created as a collection for ImageZoo.com. The illo will be going behind photographs of each of the different flavours of kettle chips (roughly mocked up below.) Hope to do more packaging illustration work like this in the future!

Hee hee hee : these chips make an appearance on the Rick Mercer Report

This is one of three signs I illustrataed this past weekend for the Beausoleil Island Trails for Parks Canada. They are rather large paintings, 12×18 inches, so I had to scan the original watercolours in pieces then put them together in Photoshop. The signs will have text around the outside of the illustration. This one’s my fav. of the three signs… I love leopard frogs, I used to catch them all the time as a kid. And red-winged blackbirds are such beautiful songbirds. Was a lot of fun to illustrate this past weekend. You can check out some of the previous work I’ve done for Parks Canada here.