I was at the Toronto Art Crawl Christmas Market yesterday, which takes place at The Great Hall on Queen Street. Boy oh boy, is it a beautiful venue! However, to be completely honest and fair, you could put fairy lights on a garbage dump and I’d take a picture and put it on Instagram, let’s be real. But seriously - being up on a balcony and getting to people watch all day long while ALSO getting to meet so many lovely people all day long? Uh, fantastic.
So YESTERDAY I was just sitting on my couch, MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS, when BlogTO reached out and asked if they could interview me for an ARTICLE that they were writing? I am…still shaking!
You can read the article by clicking here — let me know what you think! I’m beyond thrilled and grateful. A huge thanks to Tanya Mok from BlogTO from writing such a lovely piece about me.
With Christmas markets on the way, I put together a new notebook design featuring all of Toronto’s famous animals. It’s available in both lined and plain paper which is so exciting (and it’s recycled paper, too! woohoo!)
Well, it’s Christmas market season now, and while these boxes all normally live out in the garage (yes, I am VERY LUCKY to live in an apartment that’s got some storage space for me to cram all my market stuff into), they’re getting a little action by staying out in the hallway for the next few weeks instead as it’s just too much to cart them back and forth from the garage to the house.
Anyway - this is all to say that this is what my hallway’s gonna look like for the next, like, five weeks.
Just working away on this little blue guy this afternoon!
If you’ve seen the storefronts I’ve drawn up until now, you can probably make a super-safe assumption that I live in the west end because, uh… everything I’ve drawn is in the west end? Over the past few months I’ve been asked where all my east end stuff is, and that’s a GOOD heckin’ question. I finally added some new east end portraits to the mix and I’m really happy with how they turned out!
I am beYOND thrilled to introduce my newest product in my online store: stickers!!! These babies are super durable vinyl stickers - meaning you can put ‘em on, like, laptops and cellphones and stainless steel water bottles and these babies won’t peel off or scratch and fade away. Buy a million and put ‘em on everything!!!
One of my favourite new pieces is this postcard, decorated with the Little Free Libraries that I spot from street to street while I walk through my neighbourhood. Have you heard of these little cuties? They’re very sweet — the idea is that you drop off any books you’re not getting any use of, and if you’d like to pick up a book to take home with you, you can! People put them out on their front lawns and they never fail to make me happy.
If you’re interested in grabbing one of these postcards for yourself, you can do so here!
I bought myself a new sweater from Uniqlo and it is essentially the equivalent of wearing a hug? My studio is in an addition that was built onto the apartment we live in and it has no insulation on any of the walls and so it is, uh, VERY cold in there. So be prepared to see me in this sweater from now until April, I guess.
My neighbour’s cat, Dandelion (that’s his real name!!!!!! I can’t handle it!!!!), sometimes likes to hop on my window sill and say hello while I’m working in the studio. The ideal co-working buddy, because he never complains about my non-stop ABBA-playing.
Last weekend I tabled at my first ever market/festival! Dundas West Fest was such a blast - two days of meeting lovely people non-stop and hearing little stories about why certain places were important to people. It was so much fun and I can’t wait to do more this year, and hopefully many many more in the future as well.
Thank you so, so much to everyone who came out to say hello or purchase something - I was doing internal happy dances all day long!
An extra, extra special thank you to Rachel from Rachel Dudley Photography for snapping these super fun photos - go STRAIGHT TO HER if you need your family photos done. Like, asap. She is the best.
Okay so… I’ll be real with you for a sec. When you decide to run your own business and take on every aspect of running a business (accounting! social media marketing! online store managing!), then you a.) feel like a ~bad ass boss~, but also b.) end up having to do things you’re… either not very good at, or don’t super enjoy.
Case in point: PRODUCT PHOTOS. I find that taking pictures of prints, stickers, and notebooks is not my forte. I scroll through so many other artists’ websites and just think, “how?! how’d you make it look so perfect and bright and good?” Also — because you are, again, wearin’ every hat that comes along with running a business, you tend to be pressed for time, and the number of times I’ve spent an entire afternoon taking product photos only to find one detail of and having to re-do all of them — well, let’s just not talk about that.
ANYWHO, this is just to say that, uh, sometime’s we’re not that good at things and as a result we heck up and have to do them over and over and over again. Womp, womp!
Went to Kansas City for the long weekend to visit some pals and one of the places we went to was the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art — not only is Kansas City a wonderful placed filled with a lot of good and cool things (they’ve definitely won the award for Best Tiki Bar Ever if u ask me), but this museum in particular was a gem. Look at all these textures!
So my ~BiG gOaL~ of 2018 was to finally start doing tabling at markets. I’ve always found it so intimidating (“I don’t have enough stuff to sell!” “Who the heck is going to want to buy something of mine?” “Where do you buy one of those big-ass TENTS from?”*)
But I finally bit the bullet and applied to a bunch of shows and figured I’d just cross that bridge when I get there (an excellent business strategy, I’ve heard) and, well, looks like I’ll be tabling at my very first event in June at Dundas West Fest! I have gone to this street festival a lot and have found that of all the street festivals in Toronto, this one has a good selection of not just food and open patios, but also good art and craft vendors as well. I’m very nervous and very excited.
But what this also means is I’ve got to get cracking and start really focusing on producing some more work so I actually have a bunch of things to display and sell at the market.
* uh, Amazon. 2017 Nat was a dummy.
Working a little on my graphic novel this morning. I feel like I’m constantly shocked by how looooooong things take me - for example, scribbling out rough thumbnails, translating them into larger sketches, inking them in, etc. Here’s a little sneak peak of a page!
I’ve had gouache paints just hangin’ around my studio for the longest time. I love watching other artists use it but I’m not 100% sure on how to go about using it myself. I’m still figuring out how to use colour, so I thought I’d try scribbling with some pencil crayons overtop the dried paint - this was all truly uncharted territory for me!
Another graphic novel update - slow burning, but chuggin’ along.
I love few things more than when I get to add Very Good Boys into illustrations for clients!
I’ve written more about this in detail here, but I’ve decided to write a graphic novel about my relationship with eating food and body image. This is an idea that has been swimming in my mind for years and years now, and I have the feeling it’s going to be a project that takes me a long time to finish - not only is writing a book, uh, hard? but also writing one about something that’s kind of a difficult subject makes it even harder… but to be honest, I think it will be really worth it.
Please bear with me as these updates will most likely be a bit sparse at first, but I hope to have it done sometime soon.
I used to attend a lot of life drawing classes — and probably should get back into doing that! I love not only trying to draw the model and capture the energy of the pose, but also looking around at everyone else who’s drawing and see how they’ve interpreted the model’s movements and twisting limbs.
These sketches are from 2017 - waaaay back in the day!
