I have this strange interest of exploring the sense of home in art. I want to go back to great Canadian artists (such as the Group of Seven) but bring something innovative to the table, like the Bauhaus movement.

Style: Fusing fine art with graphic design principles
Content: exploring Canadian identity and the sense of home

I’m starting to work on a couple of canvases this winter (large scale). I started one last night after coming back from the artshow (By The Pound) @ Sleeping Giant.

It’s currently a 2 x 3 feet collage. I’m going to keep adding on more layers to build up the piece.

Ah, and of course, practicing black and white portraiture paintings…

I’m also working on a series of collage/observational sketches around Toronto! And the usual almost-daily sketchbook entries

401 Richmond Cafe:

Sidney Smith (U of T):

McCaul & College St:

While designing infographics, I’m starting to notice quite a few potential problem areas that can lead to sending hetero-sexist or sexist messages simply by how we’re representing the idea of marriage or sex, even gender.

Then it spurred a thought about how powerful visual messages can impact society’s view on many things.. especially sexuality and gender.

“Study: couples married for an average of 40 years know less about one another’s food, movie and personal preferences than do partners who’ve been married for 1-2 years”

“In Japan, 36.8% of men and 9.1% of women regularly smoke. The average Japanese smoked 2,028 cigarettes in 2007″

Statistics from and infographics for: geekstats.com

I’ve also updated my sketchbook today! 27 pages in a week.. still experimenting:

My roomie Melody-Blue Klassen is the stamp queen.

I picked up these stamps with her at an antique store on Queen street.

She’s also the stipple queen. Just a queen in every sense.

My inspiration: a digital stipple of this morning’s breakfast:

Process for rendering the final End Wildfires stamp project. I have yet to scan in the final product!

I dropped by the Regional Assembly of Text again… an artsy independent store that holds one of Vancouver’s few Zine Libraries. Last summer, I remember going to the library and donating a few of my mini zines. To my surprise, they were still there:

August starts tomorrow and I have several big plans to end off the summer with… which will flow right into the school year.

A new online business - I will release a report with the logistics behind this idea after this has been out for at least 3 months:

Projects, projects, projects - I’ve finally updated my projects section of the site. It made me realize that I am juggling a lot at the moment (yet, oddly enough, I don’t feel stressed about them). The only two blogs I’ve decided to keep have been around for almost 4 years now?? Right now, they just need to be updated… as for turning it into a blog network (or using it for marketing a different project..) I will have to wait to come up with a strategy that’ll work. For now, these will be like land property, an investment over time… but not ready for use yet.

The death of nufrosh and birth of Visual Pile - I might kill off nufrosh… this might be really hard because I’ve formed an attachment, it’s always been with me since highschool!

I am looking to start branding a tiny design firm this year (it’s just a concept at the moment, and will be online-based for now). The goal is to have it decently established for when I graduate, which is when I will register the business name, and turn a concept into reality. This might be the birth of Visual Pile because of it’s marketability potential over nufrosh.

At the surface level, you can notice that each blog advertises another blog in a one way direction, there are not benefits that are directly reciprocated. However, when looking at the network as a whole ecosystem, they are all connected to each other. As one blog benefits, the whole networking flourishes as well.

Keeping the network connection indirect is impacting to:

1) SEO (search engine optimization): it allows the maximum potential for SEO. When links are reciprocating, search engines usually lower the value of the link because they are not viewed as organic (since it may be a link exchange).

2) User Traffic: this also allows visitors to shuffle along the blog network, spreading the users and traffic across the network in a controlled maze. If the relationship were simply between two blogs, the benefits would only be exclusively exchanged amongst them.

Acquiring a large blog network leads to several benefits for your dominant and secondary businesses. How can you intertwine all of your projects so that they can form a network of symbiosis relationships?

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
G.K. Chesterton

“Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.”
Aldous Huxley

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
Rosa Luxemburg

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
Robert Frost

“If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.”
Chuck Palahniuk