Foolish Endeavors: Old School

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.

Schooling or Drawing?

Then I headed off to the University of Toronto to major in Celtic Studies. I still doodled all of the time.

I did this while I was taking a Religions survey course during the fall of my first year. It started as a doodle and despite the fact that it's 8.5" x 11", I managed to squeeze a fair amount of detail in.

I ended up doing a drawing each year of everyone on our floor and our friends based on the friend drawings from High School. This is the one from second year:

I had a lot of fun with these, working in all of the bizarre and crazy stories from the school year into them. I still enjoy looking back at these and being reminded of hilarious events I'd forgotten.

Then I made some friends...

In high school, I got away from drawing superheroes and whatnot and started drawing my friends.

This is from Sophomore Year. I did it on a lark, but the style of this became quite popular among my friends and classmates.

I reapproached it senior year to do an "update" to the original drawing. By this point I'd started to get sick of doing these type s of drawings.

However, when I presented two different versions of the Italy and Greece trip (the other involved a quilt of realistic portraits of the people from the trip), everyone really wanted me to do it in the original style. So to try to make it a little more interesting for myself, I threw in some architecture and a lot of the people are posed in reference to various pieces of art we saw while on the trip.