Photography by Sandra Howard
This photograph a photo of me, shot over 9 years ago at age 17 (2001) while churning through another portrait drawing. The photograph I am drawing from was an original portrait of a child from my Mom’s home daycare service. The camera used to take the shot was a Pentax MX film body. It took additional time to have your work processed the “old-fashioned” chemical way. Until I found this photograph, I had lost memory of ever having created this piece.
Give or take ten years ago, I went through a phase of drawing human figures. As a right-handed artist myself, my left hand would sit day by day, just begging to be recognized. One day the light caught my hand in the most perfect way, so I took the opportunity to record it.
I grabbed a nearby charcoal and drew every shadow and highlight detail I saw. The drawing was completed using black and white charcoal pencils.
Handling life in your own hands? This painting brings me back to the year 2000 in my own high school art class. Our project involved completion of a large-scale mural with the ability to choose our own subject matter. Upon completion, the size measurements of the piece estimated 6″ by 3″. If you look closely, you will notice that the light and shadow highlights on the hand actually indicate that this particular hand composition is virtually impossible to actually make in real life.
This original composition balances the complimentary colours, yellow and purple and is painted in acrylic paint. Many areas of the piece are actually painted using my fingers, while using a paint brush to finish off the edges.
According to their 2009 campaign, The Weekend to End Breast Cancer ensures that “Breast Cancer is hard, walking isn’t“. Last September 2009, I participated in The Weekend to End Breast Cancer’s Toronto walk. This year the name of the event has changed to the Weekend to End Women’s Cancers. Click here to register for this year’s Toronto event.
The walk was a challenging 2-day adventure that was approximately 60 kilometres in length. Each walker raised a minimum of $2000 for a two-day walk or $1250 for a one-day walk in donations. My fiancee Steve Pell designed and built this beautiful poster to help raise awareness of my campaign, along with matching donation-style business cards to hand out to family and friends. The campaign was an amazing success thank you to the many efforts involved.
Love moulding Playdoh as a kid? I have never decorated a cake using fondant before and was not too sure what to expect. After taking an interest in some of the cakes at some local decorating schools here in Toronto, I decided to read about the art of making your own homemade fondant.
I designed and built this cake as a celebration desert for my fiancee and my eight year anniversary of dating. I designed the cake with an outline of British Columbia on the top and a wrap around Vancouver city-scape on the side.
