art
i have a business website with a condensed portfolio and semi-condensed gallery page. check it out!
i've also created 2 major narrative projects: CATLAMP, a 192-page webcomic that ran from 2018 until 2022, about a cat and a living lamp who wake up in a world of darkness and set out to find the sun together; and an illustrated poetry zine about trauma recovery, with writings from 2016 - 2018.
default #art post list | feeds by year: 2025, all
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[art] messages from beyond (two pieces)
3 months, 2 weeks
been a while, friends. life has been really crazy for a little while. i've been wanting to talk about a number of things but something specific happened that i'll likely post about very soon. for now, i'll just share these catch-up pieces from my sticker club this and last month:
wag̱aytdoot Txaamsm da wil ha'lidzog̱m - "Raven is far from where we live"not much to say about this one other than i'm extremely proud of how it came out. i love doing circular formline designs and iterating on the swoopy motion that comes out of working with this composition. very pleased with how i got the concept of raven wearing a spacesuit across!
haaygm kw'ilo'ox - hardworking spiritthis is the currently active sticker for the month on my patreon, the last one of 2025. the inspiration is a little more directly personal, here.
i was a little devastated to have missed out on the big northern lights show in this part of the world the other month - the first night it was cloudy, and the second night i never saw anything despite keeping a close eye. seeing the aurora has been a bucket list item for me for a very long time, so my determination to make that happen for myself before too long has been on my mind a lot since then. it's maybe more personal for me because i've lived far south of my home in british columbia for a long time, so it's almost like a rite of passage that i never got to experience. i thought of wolves hunting and sled dogs running under the northern lights, and chose to pull on that determination - that loyalty to this beacon that leads back to my home.
still very pre-occupied with space and the atmosphere as you can see; i don't think that'll change any time soon. thanks for keeping up with me - be back before long.
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[art] tear in the spacesuit
5 months, 2 weeks
tear in the spacesuit (print)relieved to be done with this one! this piece was a bit of a struggle - i even ended up scrapping the first version after putting down flatcolours for this newer composition.
there's a good amount of emotional background for this piece. during a rough trauma night around a year ago, i found someone talking about how some people with early C-PTSD learn to experience life through a "spacesuit", where they interface with the world with a highly adapted internal system that works around their traumas and gives a sense of control; there's a risk of this spacesuit eventually being ruptured, which leads to the system collapsing and a loss of that manufactured control, leading to breakdown. i can't find this comment again, but i heavily resonated with this metaphor.
for my entire life, i've felt like i was an animal in a cage making the most of it. i internalized that i was created wrong or was handling myself wrong, that i needed to be controlled, and so many beliefs and ways of attempting to make myself comfortable in my spacesuit sprung from that understanding. i was isolated, and subconsciously padded my mind with magical thinking and dissociation to try to make myself happy despite it; eventually, a realization about my life situation 2 years ago punctured my suit, and i was utterly unprepared for the way it unmoored me. finding this interpretation of that breakdown process forced me to further reckon with how i'd existed until that point in my life - how i'd been stuck in a rhetorical cage that convinced me in a million ways that i didn't deserve to be myself, and was forced to try to be happy inside it by different experiences in my life. it was so painful to realize that i had something of a stockholm syndrome with my own mind; i'd known deep down that some of the comforting beliefs i held were simultaneously suppressing me. but i wasn't convinced that it was possible to have what i wanted in life without that suppression, and when i finally gained that understanding, it shattered my facade. i've been surviving of course - but i wanted to put visuals to that desperation, the realization that the loneliness and ignorance didn't make me safe or special after all; the way it felt like i was losing my lifeline in the void.
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[art] emotionally distressed wolves (two illustrations)
1 day, 5 hours
the mind can be solved (print)
it's not for you (print)downloaded some new brushes and textures and am attempting to work them into my style, to up my texture game and make drawing feel more effortless. i certainly feel very proud of these two pieces, especially the bottom one which was just finished yesterday, and i felt more excited to finish them than i have other recent illustrations. i love painterly and other analog textures, but don't like working with them as actual colouring techniques because i'm all about precision and discrete shapes when i draw. finding brushes that i can use to "texture" the areas that i fill in with a solid colour feels like a good compromise. (pretty sure i've talked about this already in another art post now that i think about it... i'm a goldfish, sorry!)
the second art is a work that i previewed on my patreon - i posted a timelapse of a sketching session i did when it was raining outside a few weeks ago, which included an early WIP of this. i was feeling a bit out of sorts at the time, and honestly in general i tend to experience a feeling that i am behind a "glass wall" when it comes to the world. that reality is fine china i am not allowed to touch; it is so delicate, and my paws are clumsy. that feeling was probably behind my inspiration for the first art as well, in some way.
i also grew up frequenting a lake by my small town as a kid, and it's something i remember very fondly. the intense nostalgia i have for that place and its visuals informed the second artwork a lot; that feeling of nostalgia is another thing behind that glass wall that feels so precious and fleeting, so disarming, and yet as an adult who struggles to feel like one, it's like i am barely deserving or no longer capable of holding it.
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[art] "hat'ik ḵ'ots" and "no trespassing" (previous & current month sticker designs)
3 months, 2 weeks
hat'ik ḵ'ots - "cut in half"
no trespassingtop design was august's sticker club design, and bottom is the sticker design for this month on my patreon. i fell behind for a second with posting art here, so just playing a little catch-up!
just a couple stickers inspired by visual ideas that i thought would be striking. i don't always focus on it, but i like making sure that i maintain space in my artistic output for the macabre and also things that my subject matter doesn't lend itself to very naturally, like urban environments. i really love when indigenous art forms are used to depict or explore unorthodox things.
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[art] bilhaa ada laaẅ - abalone and trout
9 months
july's design for my sticker club on patreon - a trout returns from the sea, different from the rest. featuring rainbows of a few sorts: trout, abalone, water, and sand.
love colours, love texture.. i enjoy figuring out how to create different analog effects within my existing process. i haven't tried proper painting in a long time because i get overwhelmed by it, but texturing my art this way instead feels more controlled and therefore nicer to my brain.
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[art] lusila̱ks - raven the phoenix
10 months
june's design for my patreon sticker club. if you'd like to sign up to get it in the mail, you have until the 30th!
lusila̱ks translates to "build a fire inside" (lu = inside, si = make, la̱k = fire).
i've gotten lots of comments on my 2021 art of raven as a two-spirit interpretation; i've continued to reflect on it as new people keep talking to me about it. i've especially thought about it in relation to how important transformation is as a concept in tsimshian culture and oral history. reflecting on the famous adaawx of him stealing the sun, i imagined the sun giving off its rainbow of light and enveloping him, and likened that to a phoenix, which are also symbols of transformation.
it's been a weird month in an already weird year. my girlfriend and i had a really close call in our first ever car accident a week ago. we're miraculously unhurt, but we easily could've been, badly. this and other events just have me reeling and are really humbling me1. i'm grateful and lucky to still be here. lusila̱ksu - i'm building my fire inside. even when it's very, very difficult. even when it's scary.
luk'wil t'oyaxsut 'nüüsm da txa'nii goo, ada ama ha'limaaxii ada midmł mootgism. thank you all for everything, and please have a safe and happy pride.
not about jonathan joss as i wrote this for tumblr and bluesky before i found out. but it's certainly been another thing that's heavy on my mind.↩
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[art] t'u'utsgm ḵ'asḵ'oos - black heron
10 months
this was may's design for my sticker club over on patreon - posting much too late because i was very distracted last month for a million reasons, it just slipped through the cracks lmao. the spares of this design will end up on my ko-fi shop eventually!
heron and crane formline designs are always some of my absolute favourites, and i really wanted to take a crack at one myself. black herons are not found in the north american pnw of course, but i was inspired by seeing pictures of them while hunting; they're known to encircle themselves with their wings to cast a shadow on the water, tricking fish into thinking they're hiding from predators. very beautiful and interesting birds.
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[art] thunderbird warning
11 months, 2 weeks
april's design for my sticker club over on patreon. rain was on the mind last month as i geared up for my cross-country move to michigan (especially coming from arizona), and having seen a couple other artists use weather radar imagery, i wanted to take a crack at it. i originally started with raven as the subject, but switched to a thunderbird partway through as i'd never designed one before and thought it was more appropriate for the theme. ⚠️
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[art, art meta] bloodborne and coping with pain
5 months, 2 weeks
all you can do is runa doodley illustration i started last year, and chipped away at until i finally finished it just recently.
i played Bloodborne for the first time in late 2023 through early 2024. as i was attempting ludwig the accursed/the holy blade in the DLC, i started experiencing significant heartburn and upper abdominal pain. i'm sure i'm not the first to feel that when seeing him for the first time. i'd had such episodes before, but this one was unrelenting - basically exactly from this night onward, i stopped being able to tolerate probably 90% of what i ate before. i began having to endure these extreme episodes of abdominal pain much more frequently for much, much longer at a time, usually 2-4 hours - sometimes as long as 8. i soon came to find out that my gallbladder was a goner and i got it removed later that year.
in the meantime, i developed a coping mechanism of sorts for these episodes. i would imagine myself as a wolf running through a maze of a gothic building; down a ladder, through a hallway, up a winding staircase with the blood moon visible. i would recite this in my mind to myself, too. down the ladder, through the hall, up the stairs. this started spontaneously, but i quickly realized that my brain was pulling on what it felt like to sprint through an area in Bloodborne, to get back to attempting a boss or other problem area. areas are split into smaller, tightly-designed sections, much like a screen in Megaman - terrain and enemies are placed together to force you into strategizing a way to fight, or just run past. especially when you're frustrated, exhausted, rushing to get back somewhere, getting through each part of a "run" back to an area felt like just hanging in there until you get to "this part", "okay and now just get to here", "okay and now we're here". get to the stairs. get to the cave. and there's our good friend ludwig, once again. anyone else need some tums?
people often complain about boss runs in souls games, but i found myself coming to have an appreciation for (most) of them. a friend of mine said that they're almost meditative; it gives you some time to think about what you're going to do on your next try. i think this gameplay loop has the potential to teach you to be patient with agony. of course frustration at a video game is nothing like a gallbladder attack - it's much worse and more serious. my brain definitely engaged that same pathway to cope with the gallbladder pain. i had to just "get through" a few seconds, and then i would get through the next few seconds, and then i would get through those few seconds. just get to the ladder, then get to the hallway, then get to the room with the arching windows; eventually, gradually, the pain would be over. i said to someone on bluesky that it's a shame the old guard of the souls fandom has such a reputation for being so toxic, because i do think these games (in gameplay and occasionally, story) can be vehicles for learning humility and perseverance.
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[art] commissioned illustrations for Rosewater
1 year
got to do something a little out of the box for this job! i was asked earlier this year to draw some cutscene illustrations for a western point-and-click game, called Rosewater. i made two sets of drawings - a shorter set for a story featuring coyote and kingfisher, and a longer one for a fox and a turtle.
Coyote and Kingfisher, scenes 1-4
Fox and Turtle, scenes 1-6the makers behind the game told me they're trying for a critical revision of wild west-type stories, featuring various marginalized perspectives in their cast. these cutscenes are from an indigenous character's route as she relates one of these two stories to you - the coyote and kingfisher story is a specifically okanagan oral history, and the fox and turtle are fictional, made in the style of aesop's fables (so as not to claim that they wrote a fake "native folktale"). i'll spare the spoilers, but i thought their approach was interesting and i appreciated the level of thought that went into writing for the character. also very neat to get paid to draw for a game, something i've literally always wanted to do!
they wanted me to keep it to just lineart for the sake of aesthetics and i'm sure also budget - honestly some of my favourite work to do anyway. i very frequently see people say that inking is their most dreaded part of drawing, which i generally don't really get! i love getting to be even more deliberate with my inking, knowing that it can breathe without being drowned by colour, and enhancing it with strong shadows and shapes and hatching. i could probably stand to be looser with it to lighten the toll it takes, but pure lineart illustrations feel the most satisfying for the least expenditure, personally.
i loved the diversity of animals i got to draw for here. coyotes are familiar fare, sure, but i've never drawn a kingfisher or a turtle before! i really need to find more excuses to draw particularly these belted kingfishers... their head feathers are so fun. even the fox cub was fairly new; i don't know that i've drawn a baby animal almost ever.
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[art] Bird of Prey
3 days, 17 hours
my sticker club design for this month. simpler than my usual fare, but i wanted to focus more on the concept; a bald eagle intercepts a hunter's arrow. even though it seems unharmed, you see through to its heart, and you see blood splattered around the arrowhead as well as the fletching feathers. i'm not really sure what was on my mind as i was designing this. eagle is my clan crest, so maybe a little bit of projection - seeing things as threats that aren't in actuality. or maybe it suggests insecurity around competition, that the eagle took out an arrow likely aimed at another bird that it also preys upon. i really like how it came out either way!