I am very excited to exhibit the GTA Expo this weekend, being hosted from 10 am to 4 pm May 1st 2016 at the Toronto Sheraton Center at 123 Queen St. W. This is my first convention I have ever been invited to as a guest or featured artist. It is an amazing opportunity that I greatly appreciate, and the whole thing already has been such a great experience, and I haven’t even done the convention yet.

I first met 2 of the organizers Fareham and Chris in person at the Toronto Com-icon. They were incredibly nice, loved my set up and offered tickets to my cousin who was helping at the table and to me to bring some fiends to the show. They also brought up that the original Pink Ranger Amy Jo Johnson was going to be a celebrity guest at their show, and it might be nice for me to do an art print of her, something I had in mind to do as well.

All of this is very surreal to me in some aspects, Kimberly the Pink Ranger was one of my favorite Rangers and the Power Rangers were a big part of my youth, and now we are both guests at the same Expo. All be it top vs bottom of the totem pole, it’s still incredible to me and makes me feel I am moving forward in my career, and am incredibly grateful for the recognition. I want the beauty of all the synchronicity I’d been experiencing to be reflected in the piece. Recently I have been working with water colours an unusual medium for me. But it just seem the right way to go for a Pink Ranger piece.

For the illustration I knew I wanted to do the more structural costume from the original movie, with the Pink Rangers avatar in that movie I saw an opportunity to do something angelic with the design. First I did a digital sketch, sketching digitally allow me to more easily mirror the image to check for mistakes, as well as it is easier and faster to correct those mistakes digitally. I find for me I end up with a much more accurate final drawing this way. Once complete I size the sketch and print it out.

I taped that printout to the back of my watercolour paper and worked off a light box for most of the painting process, this was nice as in the end the piece has absolutely no pencil lines. The above image was the my set up for my first round of painting, done at my best friend Syn’s place a fellow artist who really encouraged me to try more painting. See her work here synescape.ca.

Over the next few sessions I just began to build up the paint, ensuring to check the piece with the light box off.

My painting set up at home, the paint I’m using is not actually paint, they are Lyra Aquacolor hi-quality, basically a water soluble pastel or crayon. I find them very easy to transport and extremely versatile.

Finally after I felt the colour work was as far as I could take it I went in and inked using a brush and Staedtler pigment liner.

Finally I scanned and prepared the piece for printing I will have a limited number of prints available in different sizes at the GTA Expo as well as the original art as well. I do have a few new smaller prints of various new pieces and more new full colour original art.

Finally and most recently the GTA Expo offered me 10 seconds of free advertising on their video screens through out the con. I made a few attempts myself to edit a video on my phone, but as you can see on my You tube channel, they were just a little too low resolution. So again my friend Syn to the rescue, who helped me edit a high resolution video to my specifications and adding even better lettering effects.

Overall I am blow away with how I have been treated by this convention I can not wait until Sunday, I have a bunch of friends coming and this will be the first convention my Dad is coming to as well. I’m sure this will be one of the best shows yet!