Fan mail is a lovely thing, especially when “I am truly inspired by your art.” is the subject line. I was so pleased last week when a graphic design student named Asha Mody from the San Diego City College contacted me directly. Originally from India, Asha loved the styling of my mehndi-inspired patterned illustration.

After explaining to me that she was going to show my work to her art class, she asked for basic instruction on the steps involved in completing some of my past organic art pieces. In particular, she loved the following work, and decided to try our her own luck with the style using the techniques I had taught her. I have posted my original work first, followed by her inspired work below. Check out her graphic and web design here.

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.

SandyCanvas.com website has been through many design iterations over 2009, including the current re-design you see today. In this earlier version of the SandyCanvas logo, I decided to lean towards my illustration capabilities in the overall logo but also have it double as a watermark for my photography.

The logo below is a composite made of various hand drawn components originally drawn on ink and paper. Afterward I scanned the hand drawn pieces into Adobe Illustrator and vectorized them. Thank you to Steve Pell for his assistance with the creation of the final product.

According to their website, “Moleskine is a brand that identifies a family of notebooks, diaries, and city guides: flexible and brilliantly simple tools for use both in everyday and extraordinary circumstances, ultimately becoming an integral part of one’s personality”.

After buying this book, I decided to use some of the art principles I had been reading about to design a custom cover to reflect MY personality! I used a silver paint pen for the designs. Unfortunately after spraying a clear coat laquer finish on the finished work, a chemical reaction took place and this particular book cover design was destroyed…

I purchased a sling pack from Chrome Bags back in November of 2008. They claim to “build their bags, shoes, and apparel to last using the toughest materials they can find”. Toronto has become a common spot for wearing the packs, which is why customizing the bag was rather appealing!

This particular model is called the Mini Metro in the rare pink and grey colour style. I’d give this bag GREAT reviews! My fiancee inspired me to customize the bag using my organic art patterning skills on the internal pocket. I took a crack at his suggestion and here is what I came up with…

Where art hits the wall – Feature Article in The Kitchener Record Newspaper – January 12, 2008
COLIN HUNTER – RECORD STAFF – KITCHENER
Please click here for online version or here for a print PDF version

Art usually hangs on the wall. Occasionally, art is the wall. Behold the peculiar wall that spans the entire foyer of Sandra Howard’s fifth-storey condo in Kitchener’s Kaufman Lofts building. It is a swirling, swooping, loop-de-looping feast for the eyes that spilled from Howard’s brain onto the wall in acrylic black paint during a weeklong creative frenzy that ended a few days ago. “It is (long, thoughtful pause) something,” says 23-year-old Howard, admiring her finished masterpiece, which also happens to separate her kitchen from her bedroom. “It just sort of came to me.”

Howard can be forgiven for not having a profound artist’s statement on the tip of her tongue about the underlying meaning of the abstract mural. She is not a professional artist. Nor does she aspire to be one. She is an account development representative, whatever that is, who spends her working hours penned-in by the unartistic faux-walls of her cubicle at a software firm. “I just wasn’t fulfilling any creative urge at work,” she says.

The creative urge has been percolating inside Howard since childhood and flourished during her high school days in Burlington. She was one of the top artists at her school but, like many university-bound teens, she opted for a somewhat more pragmatic course of study — media and communications at Laurier — to avoid the fate of starving artist. When she and longtime boyfriend Stephen Pell bought a loft in the Kaufman building last fall, though, her inner artist began to stir. The couple had previously lived in a drab basement apartment with head-high ceilings, so the new loft felt like a beautiful blank canvas.

At first, she and Pell figured the monolithic off-white foyer wall could use some wallpaper to spruce it up, so they found a style they liked and got a price estimate. That estimate: 450 bucks. So they bought a tube of black paint instead. Total cost of materials for the mural: $2.99, plus tax. “I had the paintbrush since I was kid, so that was free,” Howard says. “And the paint would have cost six bucks but we had a coupon for 50 per cent off.”

The mural was originally intended to be a joint effort that Howard and Pell could work on together. But on New Year’s Eve those best laid plans went a tad awry. Their artistic visions clashed — Howard is something of an abstractionist, Pell an illustrator — and by the next day they had completely covered their failed mural in a fresh coat of off-white paint. “Version one was a screw-up,” Howard says. When the wall was dry enough for an attempt at version 2.0, Howard assumed complete creative control. It was only fair, since her boyfriend, an interior decorator among other vocations, had made nearly every previous esthetic decision about the look of their loft.

Howard got to work, spending at least six hours a day, sometimes up to 12, swirling and swooping and loop-de-looping with her paintbrush. She lay on a yoga mat to work on the sections near the floor, often with Willow the cat dozing on her hip. The more one stares at the finished mural, the more Howard’s visual inspirations become evident. The polka dots match those on the rug under the kitchen table. The stripes jive with the placemats on the table. The top border of the mural mimics the patterned pillows on the sofa. “Work with what you’ve got — that’s my motto,” Howard says.

She has no delusions of grandeur, no artistic aspirations loftier than her own loft. If anything, she hopes her mural will inspire a few other people to create something beautiful simply for the sake of creating something beautiful. With her inner artist now appeased, her inner musician is jockeying for attention. “Now that the wall is done, I think my next goal is to learn to play the guitar properly.”

chunter@therecord.com

Lahinch is a village on Liscannor Bay, on the northwest coast of County Clare, in northern Munster, Ireland. Lahinch has become renowned as one of the foremost surfing locations in Ireland, as well as other water-sports including kitesurfing and windsurfing. While visiting the area, I managed to get down there and witness a surfing lesson taking place.

I did a painting of the original photograph you can find here.

I have always had a passion for painting with my fingers. As a child, there was something about finger-painting that I really loved. The texture of the paint sliding along my hands and the ability to be quite precise in where I wanted to place colour. This painting was completed using about 95% finger only, with a few small details added in the end with a paint brush. 
 

Anatomy is a challenging subject to master when it comes to drawing. With the tricks and techniques mentioned in Sarah Simblet (Author) and John Davis’ (Photographer) book Anatomy for the Artist, I was able to practise my own techniques in drawing the female figure using pencil.

“Anatomy for the Artist is like having your own life-drawing studio in the privacy of your home. Carefully constructed photographs of the human form allow you to see the structure and function of the skeleton and main muscle groups. Six imaginative drawing lessons, each supported with photography, show how to portray the bones, head, rib cage, pelvis, hands, and feet in perspective, from different angles, both in still poses and in movement.”