It's a Toilet, not a Trashcan - Don't flush weird stuff down the toilet!

As part of an effort to stop the public from flushing disinfectant wipes and other non-poop, pee, blood stuff, I created the concept for a series of ads for the Capital Regional District, along with the CRD Environmental Services department. These ads were shown as movie theatre posters & mirror stickers, traditional ads, web ads and YouTube pre-roll.

The creative inspiration for this ad was to play with the idea that people often like to draw with marker in public toilet stall, so the text here is illustrated in a marker style.

The base image was chosen after looking at hundreds of toilets on stock (I can tell you WAY too much about toilets now! For example, did you know that the curving pipe shape at the side of some toilets make some people uncomfortable?) and then applying the illustrations with Procreate on the iPad with an Apple Pencil. Later, the procreate images were traced in illustrator to turn them into vector images, so that we could work with infinite scalability but still keep that sketchy style.

Awesome actor Sean Tabares gave his voice to the pre-roll! He’s the best. IG @seantabares

I’m grateful the CRD gave me the creative room to play with different media, including this hand-animation using Procreate. This was part of an instagram story.

What it looks like to work in onion layers in Procreate animation mode (below).

Click to view my other professional works.

iNaturalist Biodiversity Challenge 2021

In 2021 I was I had the privilege of participating in the promotion of the Capital Regional Districts new exploration of using iNaturalist to encourage community awareness about biodiversity as part of the Environmental Protection department. This was also the first time that were able to use instagram to it’s full potential, by using not only instagram and Facebook, but instagram stories as well.

Note: This was part of my work as part of the capital regional district (the regional government in southern Vancouver Island). To view other corporate items, view my graphic design portfolio.

Animation - Character Rigging and Shower Guy!

Boy this winter has been long long looonggg. What have you been doing to keep busy? I’ve been working on learning and developing my motion design skills, and my biggest project so far was a water conservation animated YouTube ad, you can see a tiny clip of it in my Artist Blog 3 video, at time mark 8:44 sec.

How do you approach learning new skills? One of my favourite ways to learn a new skill is through a combination of Skillshare and Youtube. I tend to take a Skillshare class as my first base and then use YouTube to complement or troubleshoot since the response time on Skillshare isn’t very quick.

Here are some quick recommendations below:

Step 1: Into to After Effects and what you can use it for

Daniel Scott is a delightful, humorous, refreshing teacher and I thoroughly enjoyed his classes. Most teachers I’ve found are pretty good overall on Skillshare, but he’s two notches higher.

Skillshare Character Animation course by Fraser Davidson

Character Animation Creating Authentic Facial Expressions in Adobe After Effects

Professional Character Rigging & Design,

I used just a few parts of this course when I was trying to figure out how to change the face when moving the head side to side.

General Skillshare for After Effects

My big After Effects playlist on YouTube:

Character Rigging w/ Joysticks n Sliders

Bonus

How to create a cartoon water effect

Good quick tutorial if you ever attempt to move your file and everything breaks:

(The answer is go to “collect files” under dependencies first. Then, if you’re like me and compress files to move them, make sure you move them out of that compressed folder before you open them again, else everything will always seem broken.)

Bonus