I got contracted to do a logo simply design for the website shoppingdaily.com which isn’t up yet. I made a few color variations in this style but none made the cut, in the end they decided to go with a conventional letter S inside a circle thing that I also did.

I like this one most though so that’s what I’m putting up on my blog :)

I liked the simple logo, but I was never happy with the web designs that I built around it, or the concept.

Poster and desktop wallpaper made for Cara’s Birthday. You can download this here [1680x1050].

A quickie illustration for Cara and to learn CS4

This one was a long time coming. On a cold rainy night downtown, we ducked inside a chain bookstore to kill time and warm up. Flipping through a design magazine to kill time, I saw something that looked very similar to this. Years later, unable maybe to get the image out of my head I made my own version.

An abstract I did to relieve some stresses at a lonely night Starbucks. Partly influenced by the work of Martha Swartz (landscape architect).

A case where the colors came before the image. I saw these gold tones on dark blue with bright red in a magazine and had the idea of making a portrait with them. I’m not good at drawing people though, and I think it really shows in this. Still, I guess it’s good to try new stuff once in a while.

Illustrator brushes rarely, if ever, work well for me and to be honest I gave up on the lady rather than declaring her complete or anything.

While taking a course on Landscape Architecture in school, I came up with the idea for an urban park based and built on a series of 5 repeating hills. I realize that most of the ideas in my head don’t actually make any sense or contain any perspective when I get them out of my head, but I did enjoy making it. And I am still interested in that almost utopian vision of post-modern urban parks making life better (or at least more visually stimulating) for everyone.

I came to really love colors and the nonsensical after doing this one. Originally it was supposed to be about the view off a wooden rooftop into a town below, but part way through it I realized it sucked. So I scraped it and never looked at it again until months later where I got this image of an octopus stuck in my head and needed a fun context for drawing one.

I really enjoyed the graphic novel ‘Nil’ about a layer of hell where nothing matters to anyone - I’d recommend it. It’s still the only graphic novel I’ve ever read (I still plan to get around to Watchmen and others though).

Anyways, I really liked the style of illustration that the author used where he’d repeatedly use very simple geometric monochrome shapes to create a much more intricate whole. So this was my humble homage.

While in my 2nd last year of university, I made this for a friend’s birthday. Based on an image I found online, I meticulously added layered the details on trying to get as close to the photo. I probably spent more time on this than I have on anything else since, but looking at this now I can see the many flaws and how I could’ve done a better job in much less time.

C’est la vie.

Sometime in 07, I saw a promotion for an project called Pe Bukk (or something like that). It was supposed to be a collection of illustrations using only black and white (no greys allowed), so for fun I whipped this up and sent this to the author. Shortly after that I couldn’t find the site and never heard from the author again. Who knows what happened? *mysterious music*

Later on, I remixed this up and used it for the cover of my portfolio to apply to the UofT Architecture grad program. I didn’t get in though :(

2006. With the help of an illustrator tutorial I found online I created this colorful bamboo, and really started this whole thing.