(painting) Happy Birthday

My moms birthday is coming up and to surprise her we had a surprise party. She was invited to my aunts house for my cousins birthday to find the entire family waiting to wish her a happy birthday. As a rule the number 50 and the word fifty were illegal to write on the card or any gift.
I was asked to make her a big card for everyone to sign. She likes dragonflies, dragonfly ornaments fill her garden and cover her walls, so I decided to paint 50 of them on the card. I looked at the paper and scratched my head, "how am i going to fit 50 dragonflies on this card?" I asked myself aloud.
My original idea had them all flying around in a garden, but it would have never fit. That gave me the idea of a floral boarder, using 4/50 dragonflies in the corners. I then divided the remaining 46; 26 were simplified to the point of becoming dots in the background. The remaining 20 were portrayed as line drawings using a variety of colors; 19 on the front leaving one for the inside.






Time Flies When Your Having Fun Happy Birthday

(animation) A look at Fashion

This video depicts a certain t-shirt design that popped up just a few years ago. I disagree with the message entirely. This video also features my good friend and a great artist D.C Nchama. enjoy

(sketch) Kass Banning Out Of Context

Kass Banning was a History of Film professor that I had encountered at OCAD. The class was broken up in half; the first was the lecture, and the second was a film. She also was a teacher at U of T for the same type of coarse. This gave her an unnatural sense of righteousness
fueled by the assumption that because we were art students, instead of film majors like at U of T, we were too dumb, or at least not skilled enough to fully comprehend the material. she would say things like "i know you all study art or design so i don't expect you to know..."
Either way I had lost the respect needed to properly pay attention to this woman. Instead I sketched her. I started right at the beginning of class all the while keeping my ears open for that sentence of two that make the image magic. Some days i would have to wait almost the entire class to finally hear something to take out of context. There was only 5 classes where I didn't make a drawing, if i had to guess they were the mid-term, the final, and maybe the first few classes. Oh ya spelling mistakes are a given. All in all it was a fun class, at least i made it fun.




DEEP FOCUS











THESE ARE NON-ACTORS BY THE WAY







THE VOICE OF GOD IS LAURENCE GREEN









THE RECURING FIGURE OF THE ICEY BLONDE











OFTEN TIMES THERES UNHAPPY ENDINGS











I'M GLAD WE'RE REVIEWING HERE









I PRESSED IT TEN TIMES











EROTIC IMAGES AND SPECTICAL, LOVE YOURSELF, GENDER ISSUES










A BEGINNING MIDDLE AND END BUT NOT IN THAT ORDER

(painting,drawing) The Boobscape

The concept of what a boobscape is is fairly simple; a landscape made of boobs. But where could such a glorious thing come from?
During my time at OCAD I took as many figure drawing/painting classes as I could. In one of these classes we were given the homework assignment of using the body (one or many, parts or in its entirety) to create a compositional painting. I chose to make a landscape painting using the torso of a girl found on a porn site.


Boobscape #1
24 X 24
Acrylic on canvas











Boobscape #2
4 X 7.5
India Ink on paper











Boobscape # 3
5.5 X 8.5
India Ink on paper

(animation) coffee cup genocide 500-1000

I know what your thinking. This isn't technically an animation but balls to you, complainer. I have nearly 6000 pictures of coffee cups, I have to do something with them otherwise they go to waste. You wouldn't want something like a discarded coffee cup to go to waste, would you? Maybe you would.... yeah i can tell by that look in your eyes that you would sooner run down your own grandmother in a light blueish green Jeep Grand Cherokee than care about a wasted photograph of a crumpled, faded, and/or torn Tim Hortons coffee cup. tisk tisk shame on you.

(painting) Cat Food in Apt 1C

When I first moved to Toronto, I lived in a single room apartment (1b)sharing the bathroom with 2 other guys on my floor and the kitchen with 1 guy from my floor and 2 from the floor above me. The set up of the building had a 1 room apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen in the front, 2 single rooms and a 3rd with a kitchen in the back. That's how the 1st 2 floors were set up, the top floor was one big 2 bedroom apartment into which i would one day move into. That's a different story.
One day the guy living in 1a tells me a story about the man who used to live in apartment 1c. Guy from 1a wakes up one day and hears the guy in 1c has his taps running. He figures the guy is grabbing a glass of water or something and he gets into the shower. On his way back from the bathroom he hears the taps again and thinks he must be doing some dishes. He finishes getting ready for work and on his way out, again, he hears the running taps but thinks nothing of it.
That night after returning from a hard days work the guy from 1a hears the running water from inside apartment 1c. He tells himself that its just a funny little coincidence, nothing to worry about at all. He held onto that misconception until morning when he heard the taps running again, or was it running still. He called the land lord and as per usual got an answering machine. "Ya so this guy in 1c has had his tap running for a day or so, maybe he went away and his cat turned it on or something maybe you should come in and turn it off." Two more days drip passed before a second phone call was made. "Listen this guy could be dead in there for all we know you have to come and check it out."
Eventually the land lord showed up only to find that yes the man in 1c had in fact died. He had had a heart attack while doing some dishes the night before this story began and had made it part way to the door before sleeping into death. His cat having had no food after a day had begun to nibble at his ear leading to the decision of having a pet free building.
I was so blown away by this tale that I created a 158 piece puzzle.

(digital illustration) Digital Illustrations

I found a muse.
This girl is ever so fun and helps me bounce ideas off of her nearly any time of day. Some of the ideas come from conversations and others straight from her mouth. In the first few months of seeing her I created a series of digital illustrations based on our conversations and the way in which my dirty mind could twist said conversations into perverse images.
I made a limited run of digital prints and sold them during the 1000 for 10 show.

Bikini Jello Wrestling the Internet

My muse and I were talking via MSN Messenger when her Internet connection began to cut in and out making her so frustrated that she proclaimed that she wanted to fight the Internet. as the conversation progressed details were filled in such as the flavor of the jello and the color of the bikinis .









Vibrator Science

One day while my muse was all alone in her apartment she decided to find out if her roommates (who happened to be her parents) were able to hear her using her "back massager" from down the hallway. This was one of the 1st pieces I sold at 1000 for 10. It sold to a middle aged woman who had no clue what it was about until I told her.








Sexy Math 101

My muse is going back to school but to get in she has to pass an entrance test and one of the subjects is trigonometry. I would be a math whizz if for every right answer the sexy math teacher undid a button or gave a sexy TA a spanking with the yard stick. Sadly they don't teach like that causing me to be average at math on a good day.









Tree Seppuku

My muse had to print off a pretest which ended up being much bigger than she had thought. She printed off so much paper that she needed to preform the Japanese stomach cutting, suicide ritual, Seppuku, to regain her honour after becoming the sole murderer of what must have been an entire forest at one time. One of my favorites... but don't tell the others, they'll get jealous.








Rent Check Domination

My Muse and I were discussing money woes when Turing to the erotic/perverted side of society may have seemed like an adequate solution
to the question of "how will I pay my rent this month." The conversation soon had my Muse in tight black leather wielding a whip.










Battling Tiredness

The short version of the story is that this illustration is based on the simple phrase, "I'm feeling tired but I can't go to sleep yet." The long version, well you don't want to know the long version. It might scar you for life, and I don't want that on my hands. But know this, sheep can go to hell and die those fluffy white liberal baaaastards.








Hot Coffee

My Muse had a disappointing girl on girl experience. This girl had sensitive nipples and therefore wouldn't let my Muse play with her tits. Playing with tits was the whole reason she wanted to have a rock, paper, scissors game where rock and paper are not welcome. I tossed the ladies inside of a giant version of the mug I am drinking coffee from as I type this, and had them pour coffee on each other because of my own coffee obsession.... its hot.







Homeless Hooker

Because I went to Art School the idea of becoming homeless has come up once or twice. I told my muse of an idea I had for trading cardboard boxes for bigger ones until one day I was back on my feet. My Muse had other plans. She would stack refrigerator boxes together into some sort of cardboard castle. But she would most likely end up just using it as her office to trade hand jobs for ham sandwiches.

(animation) LIfe of a Smoke

While working at a telemarketing place I was told that there was no reading or doodling allowed at my work station. From that moment on it was my mission to be fired for drawing. I would have put it on my resume in bold, triple underlined. In the end I was fired because I had too much stuff to do at school leaving me a shift shorter than the minimum but i walked away with a box full of drawings called The Enveronicle Chronicle. In amongst all those sketches are a few comic strips some of which were the 1st installments of Badanamation where I simple read over the comic strip in a single unedited clip. Life of a Smoke was the 1st of 3 videos made in this style and the comic strip was been published in the zine Slimey Motives. So ya enjoy!

(drawing) Coffee Cup Resurrection

Last Friday I gave you a small taste of the imagery collected in the ongoing photo-based project Coffee Cup Genocide. After taking pictures of discarded coffee cups for the last couple of years I had an idea. What if the coffee cup could ascend to a higher level than hot beverage container? What if it could become more than just another cup making its way through the recycling plant, or in most cases, sitting in a pile of garbage? To answer these questions I sat down with a coffee at Tim Hortons and pondered for a fer minutes.
After the coffee was done I began to dissect the cup. 1st I roll up the rim around the entire coffee cup. Then i carefully peel back the overlapping paper until i reach the bottom. The bottom is the tricky part you see. you have to dig under the fold at the bottom pulling at the corner. Once the folder under paper is puller back the paper bottom can be removed from its glue hold on the paper cup. Much like how Dr. Frankenstein tossed away unwanted body parts while building his monster, I tossed the bottoms into the recycling bin. I rolled the cup opposite to its natural curve and it flattened nicely.
Now that I had a surface I needed to figure out what to put on it. The customers in the Tim Hortons didn't look to be the type that would take kindly to me drawing them and the staff kept moving. I was about to leave when I noticed the rain was picking up, but then i looked past the rain to the street and the buildings. I began to draw giving birth to Coffee Cup Resurrection.

Dundas And Batherst

This was the very 1st in the series. I was experimenting with a smudging of ink technique I used in a previous series to capture the architecture of the street corner.










Body Parts For Science... SCIENCE!

After creating an image from reality I decided to move more into the realm of imagination with this image. A mad scientist is collecting body parts for some unknown reason and he is to busy celebrating the collection of two hands that he doesn't notice his latest victim escaping.







Wife Number Six

A man has discovered a way to live forever. He sucks the life force out of his wives. Unfortunately they eventually discover that they are aging faster while he remains the same. When they come to this realization he bops them on the head and they wake up in a giant jar only to be taken out when he needs to rejuvenate.






Feels like I'm Forgetting Something...

Seeking the ultimate thrill Forgetful Fred has decided to sky dive into the Grand Canyon. Being Forgetful Fred he has forgotten his parachute. I wonder when he will figure it out.









Under Attacked

I had been watching some really cheesy samurai/ninja flicks one weekend, and then someone started talking about them at work. Here we see a samurai who is calm because he can see the ninja behind him as well as the one in front of him. Everyone knows it's the ninja's that you can't see that you should worry about.

(comics,digital illustration) A Few Cartoons to Make Monday More Maddening

I've gotten into the habit of making sketches based on tiny tidbits of conversation overheard, and taken out of context, and then coloring them on the computer. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I had left them as sketches instead of turning them into digital illustrations of sorts. But then if I could know that I would use that wonderful power of knowledge over the outcomes of "What if" type questions to figure out far more interesting things than what would have happened if I were more lazy and didn't follow through with my plan.
Anyway these are just a few of many cartoons made based on overheard conversations.

Who Has The Better Tank Top

During the opening of the 2nd annual 1000 for $10 show I overheard this girl say to a guy something like, "My tank tops better than hers because it has this pattern on the bottom." So I write that down and the next day make the 1st sketch of this couple, Dan and Martha, having a similar debate.









Fat Guy In The Shower

While I was working one night I overheard these drunk guys talking about their experiences with bad roommates. One would say "Didn't matter what time it was, This guy would belt out opera any time he wanted!" Another complained "Mine stole food from me, the fat fuck!" then the 1st guy says "My old roommate spent like 2 hours in the shower then moved out when we told him to pay more of the water bill." I stopped listening after that but then merged their complaints into one super bad roommate






Check For Wind Resistance

Again I was outside of work having a smoke with a friend when an over zealous customer almost fell from the top of the stairs down into the bar. He laughed it off saying "I meant to make it look like I was going to fall but I swear I haven't been drinking yet." Then he continued on his way inside for a pint. My friend and I talked it over quickly and decided the most important variable when purposefully falling down stairs is the wind.

(animation) Coffee Cup Genocide

I have this obsession with coffee cups that most people can't understand. Hell I barely understand it myself. Well, to be honest I've barely even grazed the tip of the iceberg. But that doesn't matter, in fact it is almost better not knowing where it comes from. This way I am able to explore the obsession on path i wish.
Just over two years ago "I began an ongoing project called Coffee Cup Genocide in which I take pictures of discarded coffee cups I find on my daily travels... Although I use them as reference material most of the photographs can stand on their own as pieces of art. They show the strength and resilience of something as simple as a coffee cup; they can be faded by the weather, run over by a car, or torn by man or beast and still be recognized as coffee cups." Trevor Guiden, Cartoons and Coffee, 2008



I have become a hunter. I stalk my way through the streets, camera at the ready, eyes always searching, until I see one. Once I have shot it my pace slows. Where there is one, there may be more. What's that! Oh never mind that, its just a McFlurry cup. My "kills" number in the 6000's and grow every day.
Think about that for just one second, I'll wait.
I am just one guy, little old me. I walk to work, and wherever else I need to go, but its never very far at all. So if I can accumulate that number of coffee cups, while ommiting any other cup and every other peice of litter, how much litter is there? Anyone good at algebra math problems cause I think this is a hard one.

(drawing) Where Was Wednesday?

So I had both Tuesday and Wednesday off work. Tuesday I spent doing laundry and that sort of crap, then some stuff happened, and the next thing I know it's Thursday and at some point I have to crawl into work having, as far as I'm concerned, lost one of my days off.
Your thinking "but days don't just disappear. In fact I distinctly remember yesturday because a bird shat on my head and some guy started laughing and saying things like; "That's good luck!", "A little poop is nothing to get upset about." or my personal favorite, "Stop stabbing me, I'm not the one who took a dump on your head!" So yesterday must have happened." Well Mr. Stabby McPooperhead I think you should keep those thoughts to yourself.
But the more I think about Tuesday, the more I have to stop and say to myself, "no that happened on Wednesday I guess." So I Guess I was just out having too much fun.
So just for the hell of it here are some nice ink drawings on Tim Hortons Tim Cards.




Ninja Be Wood
















Coffee Cup















Power of Christ














Tossed Lobster













I Like Fish Sticks


















Zombie Girl














Portrait

(painting) Cody Cupman

Not too long ago i had an idea while in the shower. No not one of those ideas. Get your minds out of the gutter. My idea was to make a Chuck Norris type character for the caffeine addict. I began Sketching like a mad man until Cody Cupman was born.
The Cody Cupman Series was my 1st truly multimedia project; the backgrounds were painted with watercolor, characters were painted in acrylic, outlines were painted with India ink, and digital prints were sold at the 2nd annual 1000 for $10 exhibition at *Hotshot.
Some prints are still available and the originals are also for sale.