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.

Edible Cinnamon Bun Map

Nothing is more cosy and indulgent than a warm bakery and a cinnamon bun!

This map is the final one in my series of Edible Vancouver Island maps. What I love about this end result is how different it is than the others in the series, with a wholesome bakery window, and a miniature version of my doggo Zelda.

Forest at night - Fireflies - A love letter to humid southern Ontario summers

I love the west coast, but every year I find I become nostalgic for the moody Windsor summers of my youth.

Oct 20, 2022 update: I’ve made a version of this memory with it’s companion daytime print. :)

My family would pack up the flat trailer and camp around southern Ontario — my favourite place of all was Wheatley Provincial Park. My sister and I would follow secret paths along the water, and venture out onto fallen logs. I’d imagine a world where I never went back. I would lay in a hammock strung from tree to tree and sketch the leaves over my head. (Thinking back on it, that child would think what I’m doing now is pretty amazing!) On a particularly lucky night we would get to see the most magical thing of all, fire flies.

This image is for my sister, here she is carrying her favourite stuffed animal, Giraffee the giraffe. (Mine was a little turtle named George, I still have him.)

We are purposely small here, surrounded by a dark but not ominous forest.

I think I’m realizing that I like it best when the people dwarfed by the natural world around them.

New Year, New Earth - Motion Design

Anecdote below, if you want to skip, jump to “Making this animated gif”.

When we hopefully Covid gets under control this year, I hope when we rebuild that we consider if we really do want to go back to same-old same-old. Maybe we can find a way to let the earth recover from our over-consumption and dirty industry.

I don’t want to get too into politics in this post, so I’ll just say this: I’ve needed to commute to work an hour each way every day for the past five years. (My workplace does not view telework favourably, despite saying one of their top values are climate action.) I drive through a city/municipality that doesn’t belong to me every day, one that’s policy seems to be cut down all available forest and replace it with ugly commerce/industry. I’ve watched forest after forest disappear. I’ve watched a beautiful mature one be replaced with an RV sales lot. Think about that for a moment. Nearby is land that had no forest, a patch of concrete, sitting empty for years.

The animals there are taking more risks now, because they have no choice. We see them in dangerous places we didn’t see them before. We say super natural British Columbia, but how are we actually protecting biodiversity here?

I don’t know how to have a voice when the system seems intent on making it impossible, but I’ll keep trying. One success we had this year was that our government included continuing carbon pricing in their future plans, but that doesn’t nearly cover the scope of the issues the earth’s ecosystems are facing. /End of mini rant.

Start here: Making this animated gif:

When I was randomly skimming Skillshare under After Effects a course tagging Procreate and After Effects came up. Why would you use After Effects with Procreate when procreate has Animation Assist I asked myself? For those familiar, you can do frame-by-frame animation in Procreate and it’s pretty good and handy.

Reasons why you might use After effects:

• you want to loop animations without drawing them (see the steam above)

• you want to animate textures on the entire image more quickly (see the concrete 20% opacity texture across the entire video above)

• As mentioned before, you want to do camera tricks, more easily handle fonts, etc (not shown here).

Can you think of more? Comment below. I’m new to this community and would love to learn as much as I can.

Looking to take the course I mentioned above? Here’s a link. (I’m not sponsored.)

Jess