Hive Mind

Just finished this one - worked up from a painting I did while in India, it's about the growing network of information and communication that is creating a new form of collective intelligence.  Been watching too much Ray Kurzweil lately.

Roots

Just finished this one yesterday, its about our genetic roots as humans, back to the days of apes in the jungle.  Its really part of a series I'm working on, I'll post the results as I finish them.

Connected

Just got back from 3 months studying Ashtanga Yoga in Mysore, India.  Probably the single greatest experience of my life so far.  Here's a tidied up sketch I did while I was over there, just thinking about consciousness and the universe - inside and out. 

Caught in the middle

Been a while since I posted anything so I figured I'd toss something up - this one is actually based on an old drawing I did for school while my brother was in Afghanistan with the Canadian military... Decided to re-do it recently just to try out some of the things I've been working on of late, and because it was a peice that I always really liked, but felt that I hadn't done to the best of my abilities. It's become something completely different now... but anyway, there it is.

van der Walls Gecko

Just finished this one - the toes of Geckos have millions of these tiny spatula-tipped hairs called setae which is what allows them to stick to and climb almost any surface with ease. It's all due to what scientists call "van der Walls" forces which create a kind of electromagnetic pull on an object... it's all to do with how densely packed and teeney tiny the little hair things (setae) on thier feet are.

More Sketches

Cant stop watching the Science Network and TED talks... so I use sketching as an excuse. Here's a couple. The first two are from a video on the Science Network called "Robots and the Illusion of free will" apparently some recent findings in neuroscience have created a large debate about whether we have free will at all - namely because in controlled experiments it's been shown that our neurons are firing impulses that drive certain actions (like whether to push the red button or blue button) before we're even aware of having made the decision. Craziness. The other one is a pretty rough take on Noam Chomsky - the video quality wasn't the greatest, and the speech I was watching was really discipline-specific and kind of lackluster, which maybe led to me be less enthused about the drawing process itself.

Elephant Graveyard

It's been a little while since I've updated, so I figured I'd toss something up - finished this one a while ago - it's about some of the dangers facing the Indian Elephant, namely deforestation and of course poachers. My thought here was to make it look like there were peices missing from the picture, and use that to convey the concept.

White Nose Revised

Something always didn't really sit right with me about the original version of this - it was a little too passive, didn't really express the idea of the danger and destruction this disease is causing. So I went back in, redesigned the digital element and here is the result.

Lotus Leaves

Another one on biomimetics, this time about the lotus flower and the ability of its leaves to repel all sorts of materials, specifically allowing water to bead rather than absorb on its surface; and as such picking up dirt and other particles as it rolls along and off the leaf. Understanding this process has led to the creation of self-cleaning glass, paints, fabrics, and other materials.

Moth Eyes

Just finished this guy last night, decided to post the original scan, before I go in and do some digital stuff - it's part of a series I'm doing on Biomimetics. This ones about moths and thier eyes which are covered in a nanostructured film that eliminates reflections, allowing moths to see well in the dark, as well as to not be seen by predators. The structure consists of a hexagonal pattern of tiny bumps, each of them roughly 200nm high (nanometers - really, really small) and spaced 300nm apart. The way it works has something to do with the fact that the bumps are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, which creates this anti-reflective effect... I'm not exactly an expert on the subject, but I'm always inspired by science and technology - and especially interested in this idea of learning from nature. We're finding out with modern science that nature really is the most advanced form of technology out there (it has had 3.8 billion years to develop, after all) and we're finally beginning to be able to understand that on a meaningful level, and make use of the knowledge.

White Nose Syndrome

Apparently in caves across North America, bats are being killed off en mass by a poorly understood sickness called white nose syndrome. It was first detected 2006, and has gone on to kill over a million bats since, with no signs of stopping. The disease leaves the bats with white patches all over, particularly on the nose, has the appearance of mould, and is predicted to cause the "little brown bat" to become extinct within 20 years as well as making the situation of several species that are already endangered much worse, including the "big-eared bat" and the "indiana bat". I wanted to accentuate the idea of extinction by drawing the bat completely solitary, with nothing around it at all... as the bacteria Geomyces destructans slowly destroys it.

Quantum Compass

So apparently new research indicates that a quantum effect known as entaglement is responsible for birds' (and possibly other animals) ability to sense and navigate with earths magnetic feild - the way it works is that differences in the way entagled electrons wobble creates visible patterns on the birds retina that can be used as a compass. I just had to do a drawing about this - how cool!

Connectomes

Oh yeah and here is the finished version of a piece I posted a while ago... mostly had it on the first go, but just wasn't satisfied so I went back in, redesigned the digital element and did a little more painting.

Scientist Sketches

Steven Weinberg
Brian Greene
Paul Davies

Reza Aslan Sam Harris

Walter Sinott-Armstrong

Roger Bingham

So recently my buddy introduced me to this great site called The Science Network. Tons of talks and debates from some prominent modern scientists across a broad spectrum of subjects... there's always something interesting to check out. Anyway, I've been having some fun drawing the faces of the various scientists from the videos... (edit: so Reza Aslan is not a scientist, and the drawings of him and Sam Harris are actually from a debate i saw here (just the first video in a series))

Been busy; working a lot, attempting to draw and paint as much as possible, and taking a yoga teacher training course that has been extremely interesting. Feel like I've finally found a working process that really actually works for me... Got distracted there for a while, lost in process and my own thoughts. Produced some cool work, but it was taking forever and I spent more time thinking about it than actually doing anything. It didn't resonate.

Decided to start with some subject matter that wasn't so personal, so I chose science. Watched a TED talks video about connectomes, and got this. It happened really naturally, starting with an inspiring sketch in my sketchbook, and moved on to become a final in the process of a day or two. Something just felt right.

So it's been a while. But I'm back with some (mostly) finished work that I'm pretty jazzed about. These are the finished peices of the sketches I posted months and months ago... they're all cut out paper, painted and layered... it's quite a process, but I'm really happy with the results. Sorry for the crappy pics.

New Work

Here's a little process shot of my next two pieces... these are final, full size drawings that I am going to now trace out my shapes from, completely paste over with newspaper, gesso and matte medium, and build the faces back over top out of cut out newspaper that has been prepared with the same materials, then to paint over top of that with acrylic paint and matte medium. It's a long and involved process, but one that achieves some interesting results, and I'm pretty sure I can make some stunning work if I really push this as far as it can go.

Experimentation

I've expressed frustration and disappointment with my work in previous posts, particularly with my process. I was unsatisfied both with the results I was getting as well as with the work itself; I wasn't motivated to produce work, but seemed rather to force myself through... to just get it done because it had to be done, not because I was excited to do it. This is partially a result of the pressures of school, and was certainly an important lesson for me to learn. However it is being out of school, away from the pressures and the constant demand for more work, that has taught me the most important lesson, and it is something my teachers had been saying the whole time I was at school. Everybody's approach to art is different. Even in the simplest things, like how you hold a pencil, there is a tremendous variety of possibility. So the important thing is simply to become very proficient at what you do, without worrying too much about "the right way" or "the wrong way"; those things don't really exist. The right way is really whatever works for you, whatever satisfies your creative desires, as well as the constraints of the project you happen to be working on.

In light of this discovery, I have been drawing a lot more, thinking a little less, and just trying to figure out what I like to do, and to get really good at that. And so, here's a little peak at my most recently completed piece. There is no big idea behind this, just a cool drawing from my sketchbook that I turned into one big experimental media piece, working out some of the kinks in a particular process I've been working on. Turned out pretty cool, but I definitely could have planned it a little more thoroughly...

Here are some other pieces from school that I'm pretty happy with, they were done for my narrative class with Blair Drawson (an excellent professor and a truly amazing illustrator). The assignment was simply to create our own narrative of any sort and to illustrate it. I chose the theme of duality and wrote some poetry - sentences that just bounced off each other in interesting ways, attempting to address some of the concerns of life in the modern world. This was also a much more natural process of working for me, and once again involved bold, simple drawings and the creation of a textured, collaged, painted surface to work on.

This piece is for a group show with a bunch of my fellow Sheridan Illustration grads. The idea was to create a deck of cards each designed by a different illustrator, with no limits or guidelines as to content. I was given the King of Clubs, and decided to do a piece about modern royalty.