(painting) Waste Not and Whatever

It all started with the humblest of beginnings...

I started by cleaning extra paint off of my brushes, never wanting to waste any. then something happened, something unexpected. The colours began to mingle and play with one another. I added and added until finally I had to stop. The painting was complete and the paper towel was covered. The next day when I returned to the studio to find the paint encrusted paper towel stiff as a board. For the next painting I started a fresh sheet of paper towel, so on and so forth. After accumulating about 3 or 4 I returned to my thesis A frame to find a post it note next to the "Abstract Studies" praising me for trying out a new style of painting. I continued making these "studies" until I had the 8 shown below, and then lost interest in the paper towels to move on to the A frame itself.

(digital illustration) Snake Her Drain 4

Another Dan and Martha comic for all you people to enjoy. We are getting to know a lot more about these characters in this one. They live in apartment 312 of a large apartment building (at least 21 units per floor on a minimum of 3 floors). This is also the first time they are interacting with other people, if porn stars are indeed people.

(drawing) Trevor Guiden Draws Insperation From TED

Next time you are looking to kill some time while being entertained, and learning something go to ted.com and watch any of the amazing, funny, interesting videos found there. I first visited TED after the 4th, that's right 4th, person told me to check it out within a single week. two videos in and I was hooked. I soon began to use the time spent in front of a video making oneliner sketches labeling them with the title of the talk. Enjoy

(painting) My New Abstraction

Art can be very therapeutic for us footicap individuals; especially if the artist is getting down and dirty with their paint. One such artist is Jackie Foster who "uses her finger nubbins as her artistic 'tools.'" Her work can be found at jazzyjackie.com. It was her work that inspired me to make these new abstract studies. I set out the globs of paint and water them down. Then I dip my left hand into the paint and press it against the paper as if I were making art with potatoe prints. Using different sections/sides of my hand allows a variety of shapes to emerge. I move between the colours mixing the paint as I go. Once the page is significantly covered, I outline the massive shapes created by the overlaping tones. I then experimented in the negative space by either; filling it from either side of the paper, or leaving it empty. Enjoy.

(sketch) Poor Little Critters

When I get mad at someone I like to calm myself down before any sort of confrontation. You know, so I don't start yelling and screaming making any argumentative points I had null and void. To bring myself to a sane level I sketch poor helpless animals being murdered in horrible ways. I would never do anything like this to a real animal, that I want to make clear. Cartoon animals feel no pain; if they did Wile E. Coyote would have given up his hunt for the Road Runner after the first fuck up of his ACME gadget. Here are a few of those poor animal deaths.

Killing off real animals lost its flair after a while and so I decided to track a more elusive game. The Sasquatch, or Samsquatch as they are more commonly known, became my target. Over a page of smudged ash I took the head of my 1st victim. Soon The page was filled with my trophies, the heads of my pray, and I felt a lot better about my stressful situation.

(drawing) Smudge Drawing Origin

After seeing the images made in the Coffee Cup Resurrection series people have asked me how I figured out the smudging technique used on those coffee cups. It all started way back in the early winter months as I was working the door at Einsteins. The night was slow and I had already read all of the posters on the walls in the doorway area. That's when I noticed an ad for Godzilla Sundays, which is some sort of sketch comedy I think. The thing that caught my eye was the heads of two of my friends Brad and Tim on the front. After inspecting the card I pulled out my pen and began to draw on the back to help pass the time. With an accidental swipe of my finger the line smudged across the card and my new drawing medium was born. I had been reading up on Telouse Lautrec and Vincent Van Gogh so I decided to turn this new style wild on the customers of the bar, the common folk as it were.


Electric Chair

The first in the series, and the only one from my imagination. I continued to manipulate the ink smudges of that first faithful card until the shape of a man in a chair emerged. Its kind of funny how the imagery in this series follows an opposite path than that of the Coffee Cup Resurrection.

the rest of the drawings are not in chronological order

Party Time

A nice group of people just happened to be sitting in the area visible to me from the doorway. It was triggered by the man at the far left sitting still for a long period of time. The drawing then spread along the table collecting more and more people as it went.






Get Together

Saturday night, live music night. Even though the band is blocked by a pillar the guitarist (who may or may not have been the entire band, i cant remember) is seen as a shadow cast against the back wall.







Sing a Song

Another Saturday night. This is one of the members of a two man band. Unfortunately the shading of the shadows merge with the shading of his hair giving him the appearance of having hill-billyesq facial hair.







First Two Arrive

These two people were the first to arrive in a group of 10 or 12. I couldn't resist the pun in the title.









Dancing Drunks

On occasion there will be a drunk person or two who will dance in the middle of the bar if for no other reason than to be in the way. This particular piece was sold in the 2nd annual 1000 for $10 show.













Douche in Green Sweater

Framed by posters in the doorway was this man and a few of his friends. He thought that if he took off his sweater he could escape the bar without paying... what a douche.














Drummer Boy

This is the drummer for the band The Restless Age who had managed to get the title of house band. Funky covers sometimes slow. They don't seem to bring in much business.








The Game's on

The bar could have been on fire and this man wouldn't notice. I watched as people, who might have been his friends sat down tried to talk to him only to fill their glasses and walk away. He was really into the game.







Portrait of a Doorman

Not exactly drawn from life is my self portrait showing me standing in the stairwell with my clicker in hand to keep track of the people inside. I like the light case on the wall in the background even though the shadows of the portrait don't match it.

(drawing) Christmas is Not Even Close But...

Pictures Of Me To Hang On Your Tree

acrylic resin

A few years ago I decided to add a little something to the Christmas gifts for my aunts, uncles, and grand parents.
I had a friend who worked in the plastics studio at OCAD who was able to help me out with the project I had in mind. The first thing i needed to do was test the pen and paper drawings reaction to the acrylic resin. I made the sketch to the left and carefully placed it within the dyed blue resin at the bottom of the margarine container type mixing dish. I then walked away, going off to do whatever it was I did at the time. The next day I returned to the plastics lab to see what had happened. Not only did the disk come out un-cracked but the paper turned slightly transparent. This meant that I no longer had to worry about copying the drawings backwards to make the image in the disks visible from both sides.
The next step was to draw the "pictures of me" portion of the gifts. I made 12 because of the 12 Days of Christmas meaning that the aunts and uncles would have to share. This also helped with math. Half of those were wearing the "cartoon Trevor" fedora while the others wore festive Santa hats. I also drew the faces in three other categories; looking left, looking right, and looking forward.
After the drawings were complete and carefully dissected from my sketchbook, I set out to make the resin disks. I dyed them blue, green, and what I thought was red but turned out to be orange. I placed the drawings into the resin disks then placed them on the drying rack. At some point they shifted around making it so none of the drawings were centered, but that's not much of a problem. Once they were dry I had to buff out flecks or bumps and round off the edges.
Now all I had to do was drill a hole on the top to thread some ribbon through to allow for my family to hang the disks on their tree the following Christmas... I never did notice if any were actually hung.

(comic) I Have The Feeling They Are Doing It Wrong

You may remember this couple from the Actual Tank Top comic posted a while back. Well this time they have decided to spice up their relationship by having some "intimate phone conversation" or phone sex as it is more commonly called. Here both types of "phone sexers" are seen; the type that gets into it and actually strips down, and those who just tell their partner that they are naked thinking "hows he/she going to know, he/she cant see me over the phone." Unfortunately for this couple they screwed up that part and had the sexy conversation while in the same room. I guess they didn't want to waste money on the phone bill, and using the can and string phone would bring up dirty ideas of pediphilia, which nobody wants.

(drawing) Coffee Cup Resurrection continued

Much like Coffee Cup Genocide, Coffee Cup Resurrection is constantly being added to as a series. The charcoal like appearance, to which the coffee cups slightly waxed paper lends itself to became reason enough to continue with this project. The experimentation with various pen inks allowed the drawings to come to life with some inks lending themselves more to the ability to produce light and dark values... what? I think I just hurt my brain trying to use a bunch of art type jargon. Either way enjoy.

Fist Date Fun
Here we see two young space aliens enjoying the night "air" in their convertible flying saucier. I ask you this, what could be more romantic fun for a couple of space folks than going probing a NASA astronaut? Nothing that i can think of that's for sure.

Gargoyles in the Knight
Yes yes I realize that if the Gargoyles are in the Knight it means the person not the moonish time. Thats all part of the joke. Here we see some Gargoyles storming a castle using what they have learned from the Vikings years earlier. If they have already pillaged there is really only one more thing to do,if you know what I mean.

Wrong End of the Rainbow
I made this one durring Toronto's annual Gay Pride weekend. I have never taken part in the festivities but I have heard stories and seen things on the news. To celebrate, not to diminish or bash, the gay individuals going sometimes litteraly hog wild I pictured a unicorn being so shocked after seeing the usually well mannered, polite, clean cut, homosexuals stripping down to almost nothing to party like there is no tomorrow that he in fact vomits up a rainbow.

In the Land Of Dogs
This began as a simple drawing of a bulldog named Bollie who spent a few days living with us while his owners were on vacation. After the head was drawn I scrapped that idea in lue of one of a dog in a nice suit. I then imagined the world where a dog or dogs walked on two legs wearing cloths. What kind of stores would he walk by? I also hid an IT like clown in the sewer.

Have fun in "Tie" Land
My cousin Ryan is heading to Thailand for a year, so while on my way to his going away party I created this drawing for him. This was the first pen to leave blueish grey smudges as aposed to the black/grey found in the other drawings. It is also the first to feature my signature on the front. Little bow ties play in a playground as the parental neck tie pushes one child on the swing set while watching his other children play.

(sketch) Enter The Post Human

Through out my last sketchbook, I had created multi-page sketches of what became titled as Post Humans. This is their story.
The year is 2043, the human race as we know it has been reduced to small pockets of civilization, each thinking they are the last. The cause of all of this death and destruction is Big Tobacco. In a last ditch effort to assist its loyal customers who had developed mouth cancer, Big Tobacco created a procedure that replaces the cancerous mouth with a mechanical prosthetic. Little did they know that the prosthetic contained a simple AI that grew over time until it took over its host.
Those fitted with the prosthetic mouths lost all of their free will and started doing whatever their mouths told them to do. The rest of the world was faced with a choice; volunteer for the mouth surgery and lose all that makes you you, or reject the procedure and be killed on sight.
There was no stopping these ex-human monsters.