swap to chronological order of most recently modified
-
I have some new papers to test out and how better to test them than to paint a wizard on a journey? Here’s their first stop, a quiet forest:
I want to sort of fine tune my gouache plus pencil crayon/neocolor/pastels etc process into something i can rely on well enough to try flexing in other ways, if that makes sense? and I think I’m getting there with gouache finally, which is exciting!
This paper is really, really thin for any wet media use — 163g according to my research — but it is still absorbent and has a cold press texture on the front. It did make it hard to not constantly lift the gouache as I layered, but it also encouraged going right to Very Thick Paint by giving me enough tooth to pull thick gouache off my brush effectively.
The tooth is probably a bit too intense for small scale pencil crayon stuff though – it’s very hard to get clean lines and the texture is large enough compared to the drawing’s detail resolution to feel a little distracting to me. I do love how the tooth did encourage me to let the underpainting in red show through more though! Something to think about.
Overall though I think my professional gouache work will be at a much larger scale though so probably worth moving on and testing other papers.
-
Joining the Arts Market!
posted:
updated:
posted to: newstagged: arts market, buy my stuff, canada, ontario, original art, playmaps, structure, Toronto, zines
Toronto folks, this one’s for you!
Long story short, I now have a stall at the Danforth Arts Market, 1856 Danforth Avenue in Toronto. That’s between Woodbine and Coxwell stations if you’re subwaying over.
I’m selling my playmap blankets, comics, game zines, art zines, colouring books, two sizes of art prints, and also small framed originals!
I’ll be over regularly to top up stock and freshen up the display, so if there’s a particular art print, zine or original you’re hoping to get your hands on, especially for the holidays, drop me a line and we can make it happen!
I got approved for the spot for Nov 18th, so I’ve really been scrambling to pull this together the way I wanted, and I took a few process shots, if you’re interested!
First coat of paint! 
Second coat of paint! 
THIRD coat of paint?! 
New shelf! 
Hand painted hanging sign! 
More signage and blankets, zines and prints! 
Full zine selection on display! 
Original art and a sample blanket now hanging up as well! It’s so exciting to have a real physical space to go set up, tweak, be fancy and silly with, and more! And I have a hundred ideas for little themed displays, especially because I opened up my convention stock storage and found some lovely treasures that have never been offered publicly before!
Now, if you’re not in Toronto, the Arts Market can’t help you, but I have been working locally with some specialty shops to offer my comics and games more internationally! So, if you are not local but want my comics, definitely click over to the Beguiling! And if you want my games, check out 401 Games for pocket dungeon packs and Wolfspell, and Sword & Board for the zines!
I have also set up an INPRNT shop to sell art internationally! I’ve been building out the catalogue, but if there’s something you want and don’t yet see there, again, let me know and I will sort you out!
And I am getting more and more of my PDFs and digital goods up on my itch.io – I have a full spread of comics, games, art and more there now, and everything also has a few free community copies available!
I am working on my own online shop as well – the Sorcerer’s Catalogue – but with tariffs and VAT and other international shipping shenaniganry at an all-time high, it’s slow going figuring it all out and getting it to a state I feel confident launching publicly – but I swear, as soon as I do have it settled, I’ll make a real big deal out of it!
Till then, thank you again for supporting me and my work! And locals, I’ll see you at the market!
One response to “Joining the Arts Market!”
-
So dope!!!! So awesome!!!
-
-
I had the pleasure of contributing a couple environments to the early development of Young Suns, from KO_OP Games. Working with art director GP Lackey was great; we went from a broad brief to two specific pieces through a really rewarding process of tossing ideas back and forth.
Some process shots for your enjoyment, starting with the broad exploration stage:
The thumbnails we used to work up into the final art:
Definitely check out Young Suns when you get the chance!
Young Suns | Discover, Customize, Explore — Play NowYoung Suns is a 1-4 player narrative life sim set in space! Available now in Game Preview on Xbox Game Pass, featuring character customization, space exploration, and storytelling. Coming soon to other platformsOne response to “Early Environment Concepts for Young Suns”
-
This art is beautiful! I was already excited for Young Suns because of the cool narrative folks on it but now I have another reason to be excited for it.
-
-
Laura posted recently about watching youtube videos of folks alone in nature, and keeping in her mind the reality that they are responsible for setting up, and taking down, every shot you see in the video – even if that means traveling the same route three times or more to get that effortless-seeming documentary contextual long shot:
https://blog.lauramichet.com/people-filming-themselves-in-nature
And it made me remember the Canadian tv show Survivorman, where Toronto local Les Stroud films himself solo in the wilderness in various survival situations. The first season came out while I was in undergrad and I fully imprinted on it – this was amazing, grounded-feeling information about wilderness survival, and it felt really relevant to a lot of the stories I wanted to write at the time! And I hadn’t really come across video content like this before – the show launched the same year youtube did, and probably didn’t intend to define this kind of content for decades to come? But wow it sure did.
But I wanted to share my favourite episode, and my favourite part of it, where Stroud explains that the real work, the hardest part, the bit that makes everything else higher stakes and more complicated, is the fact that he has to film himself:
This line, about hiking all the way out of sight and then back again for the camera, changed something fundamental in my brain:
This kind of thing is really, really important media literacy, and I suspect we need it more than ever these days, as we have to start parsing AI video and more. Shoutout to Les Stroud for making sure that he included this in his first season.
-
This fall I took on a project I’ve been meaning to do for a while – I have made a colouring book based on my playmap The Tower of the Forest Wizard!
I loved colouring books as a kid and teen, and the more stuff in them the better – one of my most treasured was one that was hugely detailed drawings of tallships from the Age of Sail, as it phrased it, which had about as much whimsy or humour as a military history display. But colouring them in, it felt like a way to explore these ships and get to know them! Wandering through that book with my pencil crayons wasn’t so different from walking through these ships, counting the sails, following each line of rigging from one end to the other, starting to put together how this all worked. I really think drawing, colouring, making art with and of something is just such a great way to learn about it and experience it.
And I wanted to invite you to wander through the Tower of the Forest Wizard like that – to have an excuse to look at every book on the shelves, to notice the pumpkins in the kitchen, the mushrooms on the stairs, the parakeets in the garden, you know? And what better way than a colouring book!
I will have physical copies available locally here in Toronto soon – very soon (!) – and I am looking into how to make this book available internationally at a reasonable price, but that will probably take me until the new year.
However! It’s now listed on my itch as a PDF for you to print at home or import into your favourite art software to colour on your phone or tablet. The complexity varies, and there’s pages that will be fun for a younger kid, and pages that will be a challenge for an experienced colourist. I hope it’s a satisfying exploration of a cozy and magical space – and a great excuse to meet all the wizards you can dream of!
The Tower of the Forest Wizard – Colouring Book by Shel Kahn and the Sorcerer’s CatalogueA colour-along tour of a vibrant, magical home, filled with surprising secrets ✨
(there are also community copies available for free to folks who need them – click on in and claim one!)
If you do take the time to colour a page or two I would love to see your art! or your kid’s art! or your retired mom’s art! There is no joy like seeing folks take something I made and make something magical and new from it. Thanks so much for taking a look at my darling wizard tower, it’s an honour to host visitors to this whimsical realm I built.
-
Another style experiment, this time done 95% in Procreate. This one has me using a photo I took in highschool of a courtyard downtown that I have painted from many times before – each time reinterpreting it further and further from the ref.
This one only came into Clip Studio when I realized I had painted it so dark that it only really was legible on the ipad – a mistake I have made before and, I am sure, will make again! That device really does blow out the shadow values a fair bit.
For this painting I returned to trying a heavier line and less rendering overall, simply making the lines transparent when I need them to fall back. I think the fuzziness and looseness of the lines feels satisfying on the environment, but the people also end up feeling a bit indeterminate in details as well.
The style quest continues!
-
Digital Style Exploration – Building Fantasy from a Photo
posted:
updated:
posted to: arttagged: blue sky, boats, building block, digital painting, driftwood, fantasy art, style exploration
click here to buy a print of this piece This was a 100% Clip Studio digital painting, based on a photo of mine from a visit to Hay River in the Northwest Territories; the sun was pretty unbelievable that summer, that far north.
For this one, I let myself do my rough with the airbrush, and I feel like it really defined the whole image, to the point where maybe that’s a trap I should avoid in future! But I do love how much fun I had with the textured brushes despite trying to protect soft gradients all over the place, and it felt a lot like the same push and pull I have when trying not to overblend and overwork a soft pastel piece.
-
Another photo study, but I took this one into Clip Studio after doing the first pass in procreate, which let me use the smarter selection tools to grab large areas and push-and-pull them more precisely.
This piece is a return to the softer, chalky line and using it to add colour as well as clarity, and I love how soft it turned out.
The photo I am studying is by Justine Kurland, who I refer to often when I need help staging something in a way that transcends the simpler, bolder statements of cinematic staging.
One response to “Style Explorations – Landscape with Figures Study”
-
WAIT maybe this one lol
-
-
This was reffing a photo on pinterest; I wanted to refocus on how I want to handle stylizing figures.
I am slowly starting to nail down a process – there’s a rough sketch, a rough colour, inks, and then selection-based painting.
For this piece I did it 100% in procreate, which means using their slightly jankier selection tools, but I think for the rough expressive style it worked out fine.
One response to “Style Exploration – Digital Paint with Dark Inked Lines”
-
Ooo I think this is my fav style exploration so far!!
-
-
Another film still study, this one from Snow White and the Huntsman. This piece was done in Clip Studio, with a selection tool approach and no lines, and a fair amount of smudging brushes to get those tile and brick lines to feel distinct but integrated.
Clip Studio’s reference layer tools is so powerful for selection-based painting processes! If you haven’t tried them, I definitely recommend digging up a quick overview tutorial and testing them out, it really feels game changing every time I use it, and I’ve been using it for a decade.
Leave a Reply