Back to Basics/ pour Iain

12x18, ink on canvas paper

9 x 11, silkscreen on black cotton t-shirt

Ok so it's been a whole 10 days since my last post.  The reason for this being that I had neglected some readings in order to have everything ready for the show and as a result have found myself spending every spare second trying to catch up with school.  

For anyone who doesn't know me personally, I'm a third-year student at Carleton University in the Humanities program with a double major in Sociology.  You might be surprised to find out I'm not in a visual arts program of some sort.  I decided to go into a non-visual arts program in order to learn about humanity in a way that would (hopefully) inform my art.  

I had always thought I would study art in university.  But that's simply not how life has played out, and while I've been extremely busy with school and work, making it really difficult for me to actually work on my art.  I've had to repeatedly convince myself that I'm not "not doing art" I'm just doing something else for a little bit".

All this to say that the exception to this school nonsense is commissions!  That's right: friends in need of artwork for anything from flyers to album covers to t-shirts (shout out à Iain Impro flyer style).   These small "jobs" have truly been the most welcome requests, as they gave me a reason to let my creative juices flow.  (and I am aware of how lame it sounds to need a reason to make art, but that's the reality and let's face it reality can be pretty damn lame)

So anyhow, I've decided to post some of the simple drawings I've done on request.  The first one is for my friend Finner's band.  He e-mailed me last night asking me to call him (an e-mail entitled URGENT) when I called him I found out he needed a shirt design a.s.a.p.  So I got to work when I came home from school around 4:00 and just handed it to him a few hours ago.  That's pretty efficient if you ask me!  Finner knew exactly what he wanted (which I find extremely helpful when I'm asked to draw something).  The design is for his hardcore band Smart Mouth and he sought to reference some of the bands he's found most influential by means of a Halloween-inspired shirt where people are wearing masks of the emblematic logos of Gorilla Biscuits, the Misfits, Danzig and Integrity.

The second drawing was for the Carleton University chapter of the Ontario People's Interest Research Group (commonly known as O-PIRG).  They are a great bunch of radically minded folks who put on great workshops and events so I jumped on the chance to create the shirt they would be selling at Rad-Frosh (the radical alternative to the unappealing regular Frosh, namely silk-screening and bike-repair workshops instead of bar hoping).  In this case they gave me no instructions for the design other than "it should be radical and attract the eye".  So this is what I came up with.  The version of the image I have posted is actually a picture of the shirt itself.  I was pleasantly surprised at how well the smaller details showed up (namely the greedy business men/women running away).

So these are  two of the latest commissions I've done, but I will be posting more of the earlier ones soon... As well as the ones that are one the way! woohoo!

'Tis all for now!xo

-P.