Limbo before RISD

After University of Toronto, I spent a few years working in childcare and teaching. I drew a bit less during this period, but I did this piece for my friend Alex as a gift, since she'd been there for me when I'd been going through some rough times. She loves dragons:I also did some drawings for some friends of mine in gaming circles. I'd started beta testing games and gotten involved with some guilds that were heavily into online gaming.

Apparently someone submitted this drawing to Blizzard as their own. I was totally unaware, but a lot of people complained to Blizzard and they contacted me, asking if they could leave it up on their site with my name.
About this time, I started trying to figure out how to color my pieces of the computer. This was my first attempt. Bear with me, it's a bit oversaturated, etc.Soon after this, with a lot of encouragement from friends and family, I decided I would pursue art as more than a hobby and basically made a portfolio from scratch in a couple months and applied to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). Here's my version of the infamous bike drawing and one of the other application drawings:

To my surprise, I got in heh.