DecalGirl has been licensing my work on device cases and decals since 2016. It’s not one of my biggest licenses, but it is a favourite. The quality of their printing is excellent and lasts a long time.
It’s always fun to run into people who have my work on their phones or iPads. The above phones belong to two of my favourite supporters, Sheldon and Tracy, taken during a surprise encounter last year when I spent the afternoon with them at The Calgary Zoo.
Shonna and I have had DecalGirl hybrid cases on our phones for years. We both have the older iPhone 8 Plus; we hang onto tech until it’s dead. They’re solid workhorse phones, so we’re reluctant to replace them. Our Decalgirl Hybrid cases have been on these phones for years and are still in great shape. I’ve also got a beautiful print of my Shark painting on my laptop and a Smiling Tiger decal on my iPad Pro.
When people ask me what I do for a living, a common question in polite conversation, I say, “editorial cartoonist and I paint whimsical wildlife.”
Of course, that leads to more questions because they don’t know what whimsical wildlife means, and it’s hard to describe. So it comes in handy to show them my phone case or iPad decal and say, “stuff like this.” This month, DecalGirl added two new designs to my available images, the Snow Queen and Hey Bear. These are two of my favourite paintings, so I’m pleased to see them in their gallery. As with most licensing, companies will change out the images now and then, keeping the more popular ones and retiring others. I do the same thing with prints.
There are currently ten of my designs available through DecalGirl. Check them out! Use the SAVE25 code to get 25% off right now!
Whenever I’ve gone to Ucluelet on Vancouver Island, I’ve walked down a large staircase to the government dock to take photos of sea lions. To locals, they’re unremarkable, even a nuisance. While I’m happily snapping photos, those working on the nearby fishing boats are likely rolling their eyes at this silly tourist.
For Banff and Canmore locals, elk are like those sea lions. We see them all the time. It can be a herd on a soccer field or a handful walking through an intersection, holding up commuter traffic.
Locals shake their heads and sigh, “come on, hurry up,” while tourists lose their minds trying to grab a photo.
When I first moved to Banff, seeing these big animals all over the place was fantastic. Thirty years later, I’m more than used to them. Last week, I saw several hanging out next to an overpass on the secondary highway. When a herd of elk suddenly decides the grass is greener on the other side of the road, it’s a hazard.
I sent Shonna a text to warn her, as she’d likely take that route home later in the dark.
A little while ago, my next-door neighbour, Chris, told me a herd was hanging out in the ballpark next to our condo complex. He knows I’m always on the lookout for reference photo opportunities. I thanked him, but I was busy, so I asked, “any bulls?”
There weren’t, so I kept working. I have plenty of cow pictures.
That’s how common they are around here.
A local urban legend tells of a tourist who tried to put their child on the back of one for a photo. I’ve never met anyone who actually saw this, it has always been a friend of a friend, but if there’s any truth to it, it wouldn’t shock me.
Everyone around here has seen someone get too close to an elk for a close-up photo, especially in Banff. Worse, they’ll often attempt a selfie, putting their back to the animal. More than once, I’ve warned somebody that it was a terrible idea, and the response is usually, ‘mind your own business’ or a four-letter version of the same sentiment. Many seem to think ‘national park’ translates to ‘petting zoo.’
When you have to warn people not to get out of their cars to take photos of grizzly bears, it’s not surprising they have even less respect for what might seem like a bigger version of a deer.
Elk are incredibly unpredictable, especially during spring calving and fall Rut. It’s not just the males with the big racks but the cows protecting their young. Or one could decide to charge you for no reason, something many around here have experienced, including Shonna and me.
The only thing to do is duck into any available open door or put a car or obstacle between you, and hope the elk moves on. A hoof to the head is guaranteed to ruin your day.
I remember walking home on Banff Avenue from a night out at the bar in the late 90s. A raised lawn in front of an apartment building put the grass about hip level. I couldn’t see the large bull elk lying on the grass until I walked past the fir tree hiding him. By the time I realized he was there, I could have reached out and booped him on the nose.
Thankfully, having had a few drinks, I didn’t jump and startle him but kept walking, the whole time thinking, “don’t get up, don’t get up, don’t get up.”
A sobering experience, if there ever was one.
Their popularity with visitors is why the third whimsical wildlife painting I ever did was an elk in 2009. It did OK but was never a bestseller. And frankly, it’s among a handful of paintings I’ve done that I genuinely don’t like. I made poor composition choices, and the rack was only suggested.
Having painted more than 100 pieces since then, I’ve learned a lot from my early mistakes. People want to see that rack on the bull elk, and I don’t blame them. It’s taken me more than ten years to try it again.
Many don’t realize that bulls grow and lose their racks each year. As a result, it’s not uncommon to find shed antlers around here, though removing them from provincial and national parks is illegal, a crime that wardens will prosecute with substantial fines.
Ironic that rather than take the reference for this piece in my own backyard, I took the pics at Discovery Wildlife Park in the fall. Their bull, Donald, was bugling away, inspiring this composition I hadn’t considered, allowing me to paint the whole rack.
Males bugle to attract females to their harem and to warn other bulls. Even though Donald doesn’t need to worry about competition, he still shows off his pipes in the fall.
While it’s not a common experience near our place in Canmore, I used to love hearing the bulls bugle when we lived in Banff. It’s a beautiful sound to hear in the mountains. I’d put it up there with wolves howling, though I’m sure many locals would disagree with me. But then, I Iove the sound of coyotes yipping away at night, too.
This video doesn’t do the live experience justice, but here’s some bugling for you. Hope you like the painting.
Here we go! This is the warning bell for the preorder for my first independently produced puzzles! Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had some fun back-and-forth with Puzzles Unlimited, finalizing the four designs I’m ordering next week. Just yesterday, I received the 3D preview renderings, the Otter you see here. As it’s been challenging for anybody who ships anything lately, I’ll be double-checking with Canada Post today to get the best shipping price I can, and preparing the preorder to launch on Monday, February 13th. This preorder will be exclusive to A Wilder Viewsubscribers and will be the best pricing deal I’ll ever offer on these. Might even throw in an extra surprise or two.
If you’re not on the list, you can sign up here and feel free to share this with anybody. Then keep on eye on your in-box for all the details this Monday.
When you find work that resonates with people, any deviation is a risk. People like the happy animals, so why upset the apple cart? Shouldn’t I create another image with a better chance of print sales and licensed images?
In 2009, my work was editorial cartoons, painting caricatures, and the occasional illustration gig. I was getting bored and painted a funny-looking grizzly bear to try something new. That small experiment changed my life and career for the better.
I painted this angry bear for the same reason, to do something different.
For the last while, I’ve been angry, frustrated, and afraid. We’re human, we have emotions, though we often deny or quash them for fear of others’ reactions. If you’re not dying in a ditch from cholera or a bullet wound in a third-world country, you’re not allowed to feel bad about anything. Don’t be so negative. Cheer up.
It’s called toxic positivity, and many use it as a passive-aggressive weapon to make themselves feel comfortable or righteous. How dare you be grumpy, sad, or depressed when things could always be worse?
Several years ago, I had debilitating lower back pain. It hurt to sit, drive, walk and lay down. It would wake me almost every night and begin as soon as I got out of bed each morning. It wasn’t long before Advil couldn’t touch it.
Shonna suggested I go to yoga with her, and that helped. We’ve been doing that together one night a week ever since, a healthy practice for flexibility, balance, and strength. But it wasn’t enough to eliminate the pain.
While googling incessantly for options, reading about compressed and bulging discs, spinal defects, and worse, I came across a book called Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. John E. Sarno.
Sarno’s theory of Tension myositis syndrome (TMS) explains that for those with perfectionist and people-pleasing tendencies, the subconscious mind can create chronic pain to distract a person from dealing with repressed anger, fear, and stress.
Here’s where I lose most of you, and I knew that going in.
Before you post angry comments and send me emails telling me about your genuine bone, nerve, or systemic issues, I wouldn’t dispute anybody else’s pain. I’m not a doctor. Plenty of people require back surgery, have hip and knee problems, arthritis, and other physiological issues related to identifiable causes, especially with age. Stuff breaks down. Parts fail.
But this began in my late thirties. I tried the doctor, physiotherapy, and massage, and there was no reason for this dramatic physical failure. Anything that worked was a temporary fix with no lasting effect.
This was my experience; if it sounds familiar, it might be yours.
In a 1999 segment of 20/20, John Stossel profiled it well and said Sarno cured his back pain. Howard Stern credits Sarno with saving his life and talks about it often.
There were no courses or programs, no supplements to buy, and no up-selling. It was just a book; one I’ve since read and listened to several times.
If you want to call it one, the cure is realizing you’re doing it, acknowledging the anger, and bringing it into the light. It sounds simple, and it is. And it isn’t. Because after a lifetime of bad habits, the pain comes back, especially in times of stress, and not just in the lower back. It often moves around the body and manifests in other places. So when one distraction is realized, the subconscious finds another, somehow convinced that physical pain is preferable to emotional pain. That’s TMS. Roll your eyes, shake your head, wave it off, and call me crazy. I don’t need to convince you. All I know is I went from near-crippling back pain for several months to having almost none over a decade later. You’d think a genuine bulging disc, spinal defect, or structural deformity would worsen with age, not disappear.
After the back pain left, however, other physical ailments would pop up over the years. I had sciatic pain in both legs that would come and go. I developed migraine headaches in times of stress. I had severe neck and shoulder pain. I once had jaw and tooth pain so bad I thought I needed root canals. At its worst, I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to eat a hamburger. That went on for months.
These aren’t hallucinations. This was all real excruciating pain, and Sarno explains the physiology of it in the book. But it would fade once I recognized that it was simply another manifestation of the back pain in a different location. Then another pain would show up, and I’d have to realize it again.
In 2016, when the physical distractions no longer worked, I fell into a deep depression, as dark as you can go, and that means what you think it means. Thankfully, Shonna was supportive and urged me to get help. I didn’t want to take drugs, but I went into therapy, and over a few years, I retreated from looking too long into that abyss.
While the darkness is always there in the background, I’ve thankfully never fallen that far back again, though it permanently changed me. You can glue a broken vase, but the cracks remain.
I’ve sought the approval of others for most of my life. When I should have stood up for myself, I held my tongue to keep the peace, and all it got me was pain. The recovery taught me to no longer accept bullying, gaslighting, and criticism from those who would never take it from me.
The most important lessons are always hard.
But every so often, it’s easy to fall back into a bad habit, especially with the stress of the pandemic. Things have built up again over the last year, and I developed stomach issues. I eliminated one food from my diet, then another, then another. Tough for Shonna as she’s such an excellent cook.
At the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I’d finally had enough of this not making any sense. Realizing I was more affected than I thought by the stress of our car accident last year, higher interest rates, inflation, mounting business expenses, financial fear and uncertainty, I went back to the book and a TMS forum site. After some healthy reminders of what I already knew, it made sense that this was just another way my mind was distracting me from acknowledging my fears and anger—sneaky bugger.
I began a new habit of rapid-fire writing on the advice of one post I read.
I open a blank Word file and type a stream-of-consciousness rant about anything scaring me or making me angry. It’s the things we don’t like to admit, the selfish thoughts, the petty, bitter stuff we don’t say to other people for fear of their judgment. It’s Freud’s Id, that fussing toddler in all of us that wants what it wants.
It’s the part of you that wants to scream and rant in a grocery store lineup or start smashing back and forth in your car to get out of a traffic jam or punch your boss in the face when he makes you feel small and unappreciated. It’s acknowledging what we feel but aren’t allowed to express.
So, when I’ve been feeling ticked off or afraid, I’ve taken five minutes to write this stuff down, with lots of swearing, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and no editing.
“I’m angry I have to draw another sleazy politician. I’m afraid I will never make enough money to feel secure. I’m angry that the demanding client won’t shut up and go away. I’m angry that my neighbour’s dogs are barking again. I’m afraid of getting old. I’m afraid of getting dementia. I’m afraid that none of this effort matters. I’m afraid people will think I’m whining with this self-indulgent post.”
And when I’ve had that childish temper tantrum on the page, I close the file without saving it. I’ve been doing this once daily for the past month whenever the mood strikes me.
My stomach issues are almost gone.
When we deny our emotions, we deny ourselves. When we allow others to assert their wants and needs over us at the expense of our mental health and we bury the resentment, there are consequences. When we let other people mistreat us and we stuff that down inside, it doesn’t just go away. It will show up somewhere else.
Eight billion people on the planet, and everybody has a different view of the world and their place in it. To live in a community means hiding your darker, baser instincts for everyone’s mutual survival. But it’s much healthier to still admit and acknowledge them privately and give that primitive self a voice. That part of you needs to speak, even if it’s to an empty room or on a blank page.
So this angry black bear was a little art therapy, another way to put some rage on the page, pour it into a painting of the animal I have feared and loved most.
Diamond Art Club has the worldwide exclusive license for most of my work on diamond art kits, and I’ve been thrilled with what they’ve done with it.
To create a diamond art kit from a detailed image like mine, designers need to convert a painting into an entirely new format, a kind of blend between paint by numbers and cross-stitch.
I’ve checked out their competitors, and Diamond Art Club’s kits are the best I’ve seen. Clearly, their customers agree as they have a massive, devoted following. The Otter was my first painting they launched last year, and that kit sold out in the first week. They released the T-Rex at the beginning of January this year, and that kit sold out, too. While the Otter is back in stock, I don’t know when they’ll restock the big dinosaur, but if you follow this link, they’ll let you know. Once on the site, make sure you select your country at the top right for pricing in your currency.
Others are coming this year, but I can’t talk about those yet. Their surprise announcements are always fun, anyway.
This brings me to the latest announcement yesterday. One of my most popular paintings, the Smiling Tiger is now a diamond art kit, and they’ll release it into the wild on Saturday, February 4th!
This kit is 20” x 27” (50.7cm x 69 cm) Round with 37 colours, including 2 Aurora Borealis colours. Diamond and Ruby members have a 30-minute early access window Saturday to shop the newest releases at 9 am PST / 12 pm EST, then general release will follow at 9:30 am PST / 12:30 pm EST. One of the great benefits of licensing is that it introduces my work to a whole new community and audience. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from folks who have bought and enjoyed these kits and many of them have become welcome subscribers to A Wilder View.
I’ve had so many requests for a sloth over the years that I decided to make it my first painting of 2023.
As with most paintings, it came with unique challenges and choices.
A sloth’s fur is coarse and wiry, with a bad-hair-day look, rather than the soft and smooth fur I enjoy painting most. I chose an entire body pose rather than a closeup of the face and a full-foliage scene over a nondescript background.
I could have painted the sloth in warmer colours for more contrast with the background or added more leaves in front and behind. Even though sloths are light brown, they move so slowly that algae and fungi grow in their fur, giving them a green tint. They use the algae to feed their young, and it provides camouflage. Moths and beetles live in their hair as well.
Many photos I found showed a lot of green, but some almost none. Some sloths have shorter fur, some longer. Some have smooth-looking heads; others look like they’re sporting a bob cut.
I won’t get into boring technical jargon, but there is a much wider range of colours available on a screen than in print, and green is one of the most temperamental colours to print. So even though I would like to boost the greens in a piece like this, I must account for colour shift.
Thankfully, Photoshop provides several methods to detect areas where print problems might occur. However, I can still push it a little because I have years of experience with my printer in Victoria and know what to expect.
When the art is for commercial prints and products, that also affects my composition choices. Most of my paintings are 3:4 aspect ratio because that works best for my needs.
I tell market and Expo customers that every print is 11” x 14”, a typical off-the-shelf frame size you can buy at most stores and that often helps make the sale. It’s annoying to buy a $30 print only to spend $100 or more to frame it because it’s a weird size, so I keep mine consistent.
Painting on a fast and powerful computer, my final pieces are 30” x 40” at 300 pixels/inch. That creates a huge file but allows me to print large sizes without sacrificing detail.
When it comes to Pacific Music & Art products, a painting must work for a long template of a coffee mug design and a square layout for a coaster or trivet. Most licenses don’t require the artist to create format files, but I volunteer to do the layouts for Mike, so I’m happy with how they look.
Here’s a shot I took this weekend at About Canada on Main Street in Banff of some of those products. I can separate the sloth from the background and foliage for my own use to make a vinyl sticker. As I’m currently working on layouts for my first puzzles, I thought about those while painting this piece and wondered what composition choices would make it more enjoyable to assemble.
Most of the time, I’ll use one primary photo reference for a painting and additional ones for detail. Ideally, they’re photos I take myself. In some cases, I’ve relied on generous photographer friends or purchased reference I want to use. I bought stock photos for this one and used about a dozen images.
With no vacation plans this year and unlikely I’ll be going back to Costa Rica soon, stock photos were my best option for this sloth. Some photos were good for the pose, others for the face, and others for anatomy clarity and colour. Some sloths are cute; others are downright unattractive, so I looked for common features for accuracy. My versions of these critters might be caricatured and whimsical, but I still need to know what the actual animal looks like to make it believable.
A happy irony with this piece is that my buddy Derek Turcotte and his family went to Panama for Christmas, and he saw protected sloths in the wild. He generously offered some of his photos for reference, and one shot, in particular, was a perfect closeup of a cute sloth. I was halfway through this piece when I got it, and it helped a lot.
Critique is helpful when creating art if it’s asked for and given with goodwill. To have people you trust who can look at your work and offer constructive advice is priceless. Of course, it’s essential that if you ask for critique, be ready to accept it with gratitude.
Avoid asking the opinions of those likely to tell you, “That’s stupid. Looks like crap.”
That won’t help you become a better artist, and that kind of nasty cheap-seats criticism is usually more about them than you.
I’ll occasionally bounce editorial cartoon ideas off Shonna or my friend, Darrel. Most of the time, it’s to confirm that the message comes through. Does it make sense? I’ve been doing this long enough that I usually know, but occasionally, I’ll wonder if an idea is too vague or obscure. I often spend ten to twenty hours on a painting. Though I have a few tricks to reset my brain so I can notice an issue, like flipping the canvas and reference horizontally, or looking at it on my phone or iPad, sometimes trouble spots escape me.
Shonna has an excellent eye for problems in my painted work. I’ll admit that even though I ask her opinion on almost every painting, when she points out an issue, I occasionally resist and must bite my tongue. Sometimes I argue against her view, but if I set aside my ego and seriously consider the suggestion, it’s most often correct.
By the time I ask her opinion, she’s seeing the piece with fresh eyes, knows my work very well and sometimes, it’s a small change that makes a big difference, even though most people wouldn’t notice. But once it’s pointed out, I can’t unsee it.
Derek is another valuable critique resource. He’s an exceptionally skilled tattoo artist and traditional painter. He has often asked me for my opinion on works in progress. Most of the time, however, I see nothing wrong. Like most perfectionist artists, he’s already obsessed over it himself. Nevertheless, when I have seen an area I think could stand some improvement, he’s been receptive and often made the change.
Twice this week, I asked Derek for his thoughts on this painting. Both times, he pointed out a couple of clunky composition issues I had failed to notice. Once seen, it was obvious he was correct, and I repainted those sections.
Even after it was finished, I called him and asked about something small that was bugging me. He could see my concern and suggested an easy way to fix it, but it wasn’t a big deal and Derek told me I was probably overthinking it.
That kind of help from another artist is invaluable.
In other cases, criticism is an opinion that might not align with your vision for a piece. For example, I’ve had plenty of people suggest I paint more realistic animals instead of the caricatured or cartoony personalities that define my work.
That’s their preference. My work isn’t for them.
I’ve had gallery owners and other retailers tell me that if I did create traditional wildlife paintings, no matter how good they were, they wouldn’t want them because that’s what everybody else is selling. My ‘cartoony but real’ animals are my signature look, and that niche has allowed me to continue to create art for a living.
As with every painting, my audience and customers will decide if this sloth becomes a popular piece. That’s something over which I have no control. All I can do is paint the critter, have some fun with it, and release it into the wild.
Diamond Art Club reached out to me in the middle of 2021 with a professional and detailed inquiry and a polished contract. That’s always a good start. Though I didn’t know much about the product at the time, their site and representative explained it well.
Aside from three images, Diamond Art Club now has the worldwide exclusive license for my work on diamond art kits.
Like many licenses, there were months between uploading images and availability for purchase. To create a Diamond Art Kit, designers need to convert a detailed painting into an entirely new format, a cross between paint by numbers, cross-stitch and lite-brite.
I’ve checked out their competitors, and Diamond Art Club’s kits are the best I’ve seen. Clearly, their customers agree as they have a massive, devoted following.
When my first kit launched last summer, the Otter sold out in a few days. Restocking these kits isn’t a simple matter of reprinting the image. First, each kit needs to be manufactured, and that takes time. Unwrapping my sample of the first kit, it’s easy to see why. So it took several months, but I’m happy to report that the Otter is now back in stock on their site.
Several subscribers purchased the Otter and said they’ve enjoyed it.
Today, it’s my pleasure to announce that a new diamond art kit will launch TOMORROW. I’ve known about this one coming for some time but couldn’t announce it until now. This one is 22″ X 29″ (55.8cm x 73.7cm) Square with 48 colours including 3 Aurora Borealis colour. The T-Rex is now available! You can see and purchase it here.
The designer(s) did a fantastic job rendering my T-Rex painting into a diamond art kit format. The conversion looks a lot like pixel art, but instead, each pixel is one of their patented colourful resin rhinestones. Other designs are coming this year, but I’m not allowed to reveal anything more.
But if they turn out as well as the first two have, I’ll be thrilled to let you know when I can.
A couple of years ago, through an art licensing agency, Spilsbury licensed four of my paintings on puzzles. But they’re a US company that doesn’t ship to Canada, which annoyed several subscribers.
When a company buys limited rights to put my art on a product, they decide which images they want, how many to create, and when they want to produce them.
I’ve received so many requests for puzzles, however, that I’ve decided to create some of my own. Of course, that means investing in production up front, but then I control which images and quantity to make.
I wanted to source them from a company specializing in puzzles rather than one printing many different products. I wanted sturdy, uniquely shaped puzzle pieces with excellent printing and packaging.
Based in Victoria, I liked what I saw and read on the Puzzles Unlimited site. I talked about pricing and production with a sales rep, uploaded an image and paid for a sample 504-piece puzzle. It arrived between Christmas and New Year’s Day. While the sample box is basic, the company will design a branded box featuring my name, website, and any other details I want to add.
Shonna and I were supposed to spend Christmas up north with her family, but the nasty roads and weather that weekend made that a bad idea, so we stayed home. Shonna was off the whole week, and my workload was light, a perfect window for product testing. We laughed at our own arrogance, thinking this would be an afternoon diversion for a few hours. Instead, it took us several hours each day for three days to assemble it. Neither of us remembers the last time we put a puzzle together, so it’s unlikely we’ve done one as adults.
I sent snapshots to a couple of friends, and both asked the same question. “Is it easier to put together since you painted the image?”
NOPE! Not even a little.
More than once, while trying to find a piece, I complained to Shonna about the artist.
“What kind of psychopath puts so much detailed fur and grass in one painting?!” It became an obsession for both of us. After dinner last Thursday night, I asked Shonna what she wanted to watch on TV. She said she’d much rather work on the puzzle, and I agreed. I was pleased with the whole experience, though we were disappointed when it was over. We did, however, learn a valuable lesson on this one. Don’t assemble a puzzle with a lot of brown and beige texture on a surface with a lot of brown and beige texture. Newbie mistake.
We finished it on New Year’s Eve. Clearly, our neighbours will never have to complain about the noise from our wild partying lifestyle.
This is a quality puzzle with sturdy pieces and clean printing. I want to have four designs available in the spring so that I have them for the Calgary Expo.
These are specialty items rather than generic mass market products, so they’ll retail between $35 and $39 each. From what I’ve seen at markets, plus information from the supplier and others, that’s about right for a niche product purchased directly from the artist. This puzzle is 16″ X20″ with 504 pieces, which will be the dimensions and count for the first orders. For casual puzzlers like us, it’s the perfect size and difficulty. However, it wasn’t too easy, and we could get it done and still enjoy it.
I know that hardcore puzzle enthusiasts prefer 1000 pieces or more, but I don’t know if that’s who’ll buy these. Will it be diehard puzzlers or those looking for an entertaining pastime a couple or family can do together?
Now I must decide on the first four images. Spilsbury has the exclusive puzzle license for my Smiling Tiger, Bald Eagle, Wolf and Great Horned Owl. So those are out of consideration.
The most popular prints won’t necessarily be the best puzzles. The image must be one people like but also fun and challenging to put together without too much frustration.
Grizzly on Grass is one of my most popular paintings, and it was a fun puzzle, so that’s one of the four. The Otter is one of my best-selling prints but has a big blue background, which might be a problem in a puzzle.
So for all of the images you see here, I reimagined them as puzzles rather than prints and cropped and sized them accordingly. If I chose four right now, I’d go with Grizzly on Grass, Otter, Sea Turtle and T-Rex. I’m also considering these cropped versions of the Flamingo, Parrot, Squirrel, Ring-tailed Lemur, and Snow Day. But I’d love to hear your opinion.
Would you want to buy one of these puzzles?
In order of preference, which four would be your favourites on a puzzle?
Please let me know in the comments, and feel free to add any other thoughts you’d like to share.
Keeping a blog is handy when I write a year-end wrap-up because I don’t have to remember what happened. So here are some of the standouts from this year.
Sticker Surprise
While on a cabin trip last year, my buddy Darrel suggested my work might lend itself well to vinyl stickers people put on vehicle windows. So, I designed a few, sourced a production company, and realized he was onto something.
The ten designs have done well with regular re-orders at the Calgary Zoo, Discovery Wildlife Park, and Stonewaters in Canmore. They were also popular at Calgary Expo and the Mountain Made Markets. This week, I reordered a bunch and added two new designs. In the upcoming year, I’ll be working to get these into more stores.
The NFT boom goes bust
Earlier this year, I thought there might be a market selling NFTs of some of my paintings. I read a lot of information, entertained offers from online galleries, and eventually signed with one. They were professional and good to work with, but then the entire crypto art market fell apart.
Thankfully, I lost no money on the experiment. I never bought any cryptocurrency or paid for my own NFT minting. The time I lost was an educational experience, and I have no regrets. You will never have any success without risk. Kevin Kelly once said, “If you’re not falling down occasionally, you’re just coasting.”
Will NFTs come back into favour? I doubt it.
Cartoon Commendation I don’t usually enter editorial cartoon contests, but I made an exception this year for the World Press Freedom Competition. I’d already drawn the cartoon above that fit the theme, and the top three prizes included a financial award. Though I hadn’t expected much, I won 2nd place and the prize money paid for most of my new guitar.
The Rocky Mountain Outlook is our local weekly paper. I’ve been their cartoonist since it began in 2001, and I’ve never missed an issue. National awards matter to weekly papers as they lend credibility to the publication, especially when soliciting advertisers who pay for it. The Outlook enters my work into the Canadian Community Newspaper Awards each year.The CCNAs didn’t happen last year because of the pandemic, so they awarded two years at once this time. For Best Local Cartoon, I won First, Second and Third for 2020 and Second and Third for 2021 in their circulation category.
Given there are fewer local papers each year and even fewer local cartoonists, I wonder if the multiple awards say more about the lack of competition than the quality of my work. Regardless, the recognition is still welcome.The problem with local cartoons is that you kind of have to live here to understand most of them. So the ones I’ve shared here are a random selection of local and national topics. Between the five or six syndicated editorial cartoons I create each week, plus the local cartoon for The Outlook, I drew 313 editorial cartoons this year.Calgary Expo and the Mountain Made Markets
I know artists who do the gift and market circuit all year long. For some, it’s their entire living, and they do well. Others try it for a few years, don’t make any money, and move on to something else. It can be a real grind.
More than once, I’ve considered getting a bigger vehicle, a tent and the display and booth hardware I would need to do the fair and market circuit in the warmer months and the holiday shows in November and December.
But with daily editorial cartoon deadlines, long days away and travelling each week are next to impossible. I enjoy working in my office every day and have no desire to spend a lot of my time driving and staying in hotels.
The one big show I look forward to each year is the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo at the end of April, five long days, including a full day for setup. So when the full event reemerged from its two-year pandemic hiatus, I was excited to return.
Not only was 2022 my best year of sales to date, but it was also great fun. I’m already looking forward to the 2023 event, though I’m tempering my expectations with a possible looming recession. Then again, I didn’t think this year would be good, and I was happily proven wrong.
There were several Mountain Made Markets this year, with weekend events every month from May to December. Held indoors at the Canmore Civic Centre, it’s an easy setup close to home, so it’s worth my time.
Each market was profitable, and I enjoyed introducing new people to my work, meeting subscribers in person and visiting with customers, vendors and friends. Significant changes are coming for that event this year. Whether good or bad remains to be seen, but I hope to do more of them in 2023.
Licensing
If you’ve ever bought a face mask, magnet, coaster, or calendar from me, those come from Pacific Music & Art, just a handful of the many items they sell. I often hear from people who’ve bought a trivet in Banff, a coffee mug in Alaska, or an art card in Washington.
Licensing allows me to spend my time painting and still reach new markets and audiences. I signed a few new deals this year with Art Licensing International agency, a company that has represented my work for several years. Agencies might have many more contacts, but they take a big chunk of the royalties, so it’s a double-edged sword. I prefer to find most licenses on my own.
Sometimes companies cold call me. When Diamond Art Club contacted me about licensing my work, I had barely heard of diamond art kits.
Though there was a lead time of many months, the Otter kit finally launched this summer and sold out in days. Producing these kits involves more than simply printing the image on an item, so it took a few months for them to restock that first piece, but it’s again available on their site.
More diamond art kit designs are coming in 2023, but I’m not allowed to share which ones yet.
I signed a new contract last week for ten of my images with an overseas company for another product, but that, too, will be something I can’t share until the middle of next year. Licensing usually involves quite a bit of time between signing contracts and actual production, so it’s work now that pays later.
Come to think of it, that’s a good way of looking at commercial art in general. Every piece I paint is an investment in future revenue.
Special Projects
As I wrote about my latest commission earlier this week, here’s the link if you’d like to see and read about the pet portraits I painted this year.
Every year, I begin with great plans and expectations, but things go off the rails or new opportunities show up, and the whole year becomes a series of course corrections. All I can do for delayed projects important to me is try again.
I tend to slip into a fall melancholy or winter depression most years. When it happens, I often throw my efforts into a personal project, usually painting a portrait of a screen character. I’ve painted several portraits of people, and many result in great stories to go with them. Here’s the John Dutton character painting I did last year.I realized earlier this month that I wouldn’t get to one this year, even though I had already chosen someone to paint. While disappointed, not having the time was likely due to the work I put into the markets, something I hadn’t done in previous years. However, my latest commission of Luna almost felt like a personal piece because I so enjoyed that painting.
I still had down days this fall, especially with our brutally cold November and December. But September and October were beautiful and right before the weather turned, I had a great cabin trip with my buddy, Darrel.
So the seasonal depression wasn’t as dark as it has been in recent years, and for that, I’m grateful.
The Personal
On a sunny June day in Calgary, a woman ran a red light and wrote off Shonna’s car. While we had no immediately apparent injuries, we’ve been sharing one vehicle ever since and likely will until sometime in the middle of next year. Unfortunately, everything we can find, used or new, is overpriced, and we’ve heard many stories of fraudulent car dealers adding extra fees and playing bait-and-switch games. As if the near criminal behaviour of our own insurance company wasn’t bad enough.
But we bought Pedego Element e-bikes and love them. Canmore is easier to get around by bike than car, and it has become a necessity since they brought in paid parking. So we were both disappointed when winter arrived with a vengeance in November, and we had to put them away. While we had planned to get studded tires and ride the bikes all winter, as many around here do, 20″ studded fat tires are just one more item on the long list of global supply problems.
We had a wonderful vacation in August, glamping and kayaking for a week off northern Vancouver Island, a 25th-anniversary trip we had postponed at the beginning of the pandemic. It was one of the best adventures we’ve ever had.
I bought a silent acoustic guitar this year and began to play music again. It’s always within arm’s reach of my desk, and I’ve been playing it almost every day, sometimes for ten minutes, but most often for an hour or more. With regular practice, I’m a better musician now than I’ve ever been, and it’s a lot of fun, especially bringing it on a couple of cabin trips.Best of all, there is no chance I will ever play guitar for a living. It’s a purely creative escape with no responsibility to pay my bills.
Painting
Including the two commissions, I completed nine full-resolution production pieces this year. I wanted to paint more.
Best I can figure, preparing for and attending the additional Mountain Made Markets this year ate up a lot of time and energy, especially on weekends when I do a lot of my painting. I still had to create the same number of editorial cartoons each week but sacrificed painting time. That’s valuable information to have when considering future markets and shows. While those might give me more opportunities to sell the work, they steal from time creating it.
I’ve put together another video to share this year’s painted work. Most of these are finished paintings, with a few works in progress.
Hundreds of new people subscribed to A Wilder View in 2022. My sincere thanks to you who’ve been with me for years and those who just joined the ride. Whatever challenges you face in the coming year, I hope the occasional funny-looking animal in your inbox gives you a smile and makes life a little bit easier, if only for a moment or two.
It’s always fun to run into people who have my work on their phones or iPads. The above phones belong to two of my favourite supporters, Sheldon and Tracy, taken during a surprise encounter last year when I spent the afternoon with them at The Calgary Zoo.
This month, DecalGirl added two new designs to my available images, the Snow Queen and Hey Bear. These are two of my favourite paintings, so I’m pleased to see them in their gallery. As with most licensing, companies will change out the images now and then, keeping the more popular ones and retiring others. I do the same thing with prints.
Whenever I’ve gone to Ucluelet on Vancouver Island, I’ve walked down a large staircase to the government dock to take photos of sea lions. To locals, they’re unremarkable, even a nuisance. While I’m happily snapping photos, those working on the nearby fishing boats are likely rolling their eyes at this silly tourist.
Just yesterday, I received the 3D preview renderings, the Otter you see here. As it’s been challenging for anybody who ships anything lately, I’ll be double-checking with Canada Post today to get the best shipping price I can, and preparing the preorder to launch on Monday, February 13th.
This preorder will be exclusive to 
When you find work that resonates with people, any deviation is a risk. People like the happy animals, so why upset the apple cart? Shouldn’t I create another image with a better chance of print sales and licensed images?
Roll your eyes, shake your head, wave it off, and call me crazy. I don’t need to convince you. All I know is I went from near-crippling back pain for several months to having almost none over a decade later. You’d think a genuine bulging disc, spinal defect, or structural deformity would worsen with age, not disappear.
The Otter was my first painting they launched last year, and that 
I’ve had so many requests for a sloth over the years that I decided to make it my first painting of 2023.
I can separate the sloth from the background and foliage for my own use to make a vinyl sticker. As I’m currently working on layouts for my 
I often spend ten to twenty hours on a painting. Though I have a few tricks to reset my brain so I can notice an issue, like flipping the canvas and reference horizontally, or looking at it on my phone or iPad, sometimes trouble spots escape me.
This one is 22″ X 29″ (55.8cm x 73.7cm) Square with 48 colours including 3 Aurora Borealis colour. The T-Rex is now available! You can see and 
Other designs are coming this year, but I’m not allowed to reveal anything more.
A couple of years ago, through an art licensing agency, 
We laughed at our own arrogance, thinking this would be an afternoon diversion for a few hours. Instead, it took us several hours each day for three days to assemble it. Neither of us remembers the last time we put a puzzle together, so it’s unlikely we’ve done one as adults.
It became an obsession for both of us. After dinner last Thursday night, I asked Shonna what she wanted to watch on TV. She said she’d much rather work on the puzzle, and I agreed. I was pleased with the whole experience, though we were disappointed when it was over. We did, however, learn a valuable lesson on this one. Don’t assemble a puzzle with a lot of brown and beige texture on a surface with a lot of brown and beige texture. Newbie mistake.
This puzzle is 16″ X20″ with 504 pieces, which will be the dimensions and count for the first orders. For casual puzzlers like us, it’s the perfect size and difficulty. However, it wasn’t too easy, and we could get it done and still enjoy it.
I’m also considering these cropped versions of the Flamingo, Parrot, Squirrel, Ring-tailed Lemur, and Snow Day.
But I’d love to hear your opinion.
There were several Mountain Made Markets this year, with weekend events every month from May to December. Held indoors at the Canmore Civic Centre, it’s an easy setup close to home, so it’s worth my time.
Licensing allows me to spend my time painting and still reach new markets and audiences. I signed a few new deals this year with 
