The Handmaids Tale

Excited to finally be able to announce that I had the privilege of being commissioned to create artwork for Suntup Edition’s release of “The Handmaid's Tale” by Margaret Atwood. As a Canadian artist, it was an incredible privilege to have the opportunity to paint images for such an iconic piece of Canadian fiction.

https://suntup.press/the-handmaids-tale

If on the road, gently

Excited to have my painting “If on the road, gently’, a part of the Cosmic elixir group show with WOW x WOW gallery alongside a fantastic group of artists from around the world.

The painting is available here… https://wowxwow.com/shop/cosmic-elixir/if-on-the-road-gently-ken-cunningham

Inktober day 20 process

Because of my training as a animator, my work has tended to be very line based. I’ve been trying very hard this last year to push away from that and have been exploring a process that was inspired by the work and processes of Vanessa Lemen, Allen Williams and Scott Fischer. I’ve been trying to approach inktober in that spirit, some days succeeding, some not.

Had really been struggling last week but ran across some images by Takato Yamamoto (you can find some of his work on my pinterest page in my board, eliciting inspiration). Inspired by the way he uses more abstract design elements around the faces of his figures, i did some thumbnailing in my moleskin. In my head I was thinking cyber punk meets Mucha. That’s not really where I ended up, but I felt like I got my wind back, which led to my inktober day 19 drawing.

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The thumbnailing generated a bunch of ideas so I figured this was a good path to explore.

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I started in my moleskin, then worked the idea up into a larger sketch.

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I then taped a piece of dura-lar to the sketch and lay a gold fw ink abstract over top.

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Once the ink was dry, I took the whole thing and lay it down on my light pad so I could see the drawing underneath.

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Using the drawing underneath as a guide, I re-draw the image using the abstract gold ink layer to influence changes to the image.

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I then went in with a brush and black pearlescent fw ink to add in my thicker blacks.

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Up to this point I had been thinking to have a heart floating above her hand, but all the way along I hadn’t been feeling that was right. It felt a bit too on the nose and also I was worried it might cast this character in a more negative light then I wanted the viewer to feel. Was kind of coming up blank, so I decided to risk wrecking the drawing and experiment a bit, to see what would emerge. I lay down some water with a large flat brush then using a fine brush, touched spots of white fw ink into the water and let it do its thing. It started to look like a white flame so I went with that and refined it.

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Last step was to paint in some white acrylic on the back to help pop the face, hand and flame. Inktober day 20 is done and posted to my IG! 11 more days to go.

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Inktober day 6 piece process

It’s was the weekend so I wanted to get a bit more elaborate with my Inktober drawing for day 6 and the process ended up being a bit different, so I thought I’d put together a process post.

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I started in pencil on the back of the dura lar. Though I knew I’d be painting a solid black around the figure, I drew the leaves around her anyways. Kind of a rehearsal really. Having done it in pencil once, would give me the confidence to go straight to ink with the leaves later.

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I then did the old trick of flipped the drawing to check for issues. This is one of the great things about working on the dural-lar. The drawing underneath is very easy to see, even without using my light tablet. Her face was feeling a little lopsided so I did some redrawing to corrected issues.

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From here I started in on the inking. First doing the line work with a pigma micron 03 and 005.

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After getting the line work in place I filled in the negative space with black FW ink and a #8 pointed filbert brush.

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With the black negative space in place and the addition of some highlights with white FW ink, I was ready to move on with the leaves using a dip pen and gold FW ink.

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With the gold line work of the leaves in place, I found I wasn’t really happy yet. I dry brushed in some gold fw ink areas on her noses and lips, as well on some of the leaves, but it still wasn’t doing it. It was feeling flat and needed more variety.

This lead me to the idea of using some glazing, so I mixed a small bit of the gold FW ink with some liquitex acrylic glazing medium, and applied it to the leaves and her pupils. That got the piece where I wanted it, giving it a nice mix of matt and gloss surface texture. Ready for my Inktober day 6 IG post.

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Getting my work out there!

So, a bit about me. I make my living as a director in the animation industry, creating animated content for clients such as Lego, Marvel, Lucasfilm and others. More and more though, I am also doing personal work at home in the form of art, and I’m at the point where I need to get that work out there in front of an audience. To that end, I’ve launched this site. 

It will be a place to act as a central hub for my art activities. I will post work obviously, but I will also post blog entries about process, showings etc. Eventually I hope to have a storefront set up to sell prints and original work. Hopefully it will be the start of an exciting and wonderful conversation.

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