Guacamole Taqueria approached iCanvas for custom artwork to be printed on a 90” x 60” canvas that would match the rest of the artwork in the restaurant and pay tribute to the owner’s hometown Jalisco. I created the vector artwork for the two figures in Adobe Draw on my iPad Pro and then transferred the artwork to Adobe Illustrator to create the gradient overlays and the papel picado background.

Shortly after receiving the 90” x 60” custom canvas art, Guacamole Taqueria asked if we could also design a welcome sign for them to hang in the foyer. They wanted to carry over the papel picado visual from the custom artwork as well as use cooler colors.

This initially started out as an exercise using Max Ulichney’s Procreate Watercolor Brush Pack in conjunction with Kelogsloops’ Watercolor Waves Tutorial. However, I was looking at the very first pieces I had ever uploaded to Instagram and remembered that my first painting was a koi fish, so I was inspired to do a “redraw.”

This piece will be exhibited in 2020 at the Slaysian Exhibition in the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, IL, and will be available as a paper and canvas print in my store.

I really wanted to capture the feeling of smelling something and having it take you back to a time long gone; as bittersweet as it might be, it’s still nice to be reminded. Created in Procreate on the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

This piece was exhibited in March 2020 at the Side Street Studio Art’s Year 7 Exhibition in Elgin, IL, where it won “Audience Favorite”!

Available as a paper and canvas print in my store.

I created some holiday themed greeting cards to sell in my shop as a printable! These were all designed in the app Procreate!

Since there aren’t too many places I can go these days, I thought it would be fun to do some virtual plain air painting in the world of video games! I did this on stream and started up Okami on my Switch and found a place inside the game to do a digital plein air painting of. I chose the first location in the game of Kamiki Village on the hill that overlooks the Sakuya tree. I chose not to include Amaterasu in the image because I really wanted to focus on the landscape.

The firefox quickly bounded across the water, never paying any mind to the reflection below. It knew quite well what the sky above looked like; after all, was there a better way to announce his arrival to the next village over than a light show? The bells on his tail seemed to disagree.

I created this piece for the Character Design Challenge for the month of November, in which the theme was “Fox Adventurer”. It was my first time submitting for the challenge and my first time documenting the process of creating the character. All of the design process was done in Procreate, and the final piece after the colored concept sketch was done using only brushes from the Airbrushes.

I started thinking that I wanted to do something with a bat-eared fox to try and stand out, and I thought it would be interesting to try and go down the route of having the fox be a magic user. However I quickly grew frustrated with the idea and found myself looking at the firefox stickers I had created a few months back based on the Finnish folklore of the firefox. In my mind, a perfect job for a firefox that was adventuring (or rather, the reason why the firefox would be adventuring in the first place) would be to deliver messages to people in a world that is not ruled my technology such as cellphones and computers. I also wanted to keep the fox as a quadreped instead of a bipedal more human-like character because I figured travel would be much quicker that way.

I thought it would be fitting for a fox adventurer to be ferrying scrolls back and forth and thought a little harness would be fitting. The pouch is for payment of its services, although in my mind it would also accept some food and shelter for the night as payment rendered. The bells and bow were designed with the thought of how to represent the way it interacts with others, and I wanted to make the fox look approachable, as though even a little girl wouldn’t hesitate to go near it and decorate its tail.

This design was a lot of fun, and I strongly believe that I will do more with this character in the future.

A friend told me about the Finnish firefox, which is a fox whose tail is basically on fire and causes the Aurora Borealis when it hits things. I knew I really wanted to design some stickers for it, and these were born. I thought the iridescent nature of the Northern Lights would look great in foil, so these were designed with foil in mind.

These stickers (especially the red fox) would later be further inspiration for my Firefox Messenger character design.

These stickers are available as a set in my shop!

My first foray into isometric illustration, inspired by all of the technology that I find accompanies me on my artistic journey. This is also the first time that I realized all of my devices are essentially Space Grey, which is kind of ironic considering that I like having more color in my life.

A commission that I absolutely loved working on for a first wedding anniversary, based on the Sean Bates poem that the groom read at their wedding. The lighthouse depicted is the Morro Fort & Castle in San Juan in Puerto Rico.

This was done in Procreate with the text tool and Max Ulichney’s Watercolor Brush Pack; text formatting was requested by client, not based on original poem.

I was honored to participate in a Chicago Art Battle, which is a live painting competition in which artists only get 20 minutes to paint on an 18” x 24” canvas. I used brushes and my own fingers to paint, and my painting was auctioned off at the end of the night.