David Apatoff's Illustration Art Blog

ILLUSTRATION ART is a site I was lucky enough to stumble upon, following a sidebar link from Drawn.ca (also a great site with lots of new work from around the web every day.)

David Apatoff puts a lot of love into his writeups that focus mostly on 20th century illustrations and illustrators. Never pretentious, never too wordy, but rich with a deep understanding of the work he chooses to write about. And the work that he does choose is well-distributed from the unknown to household names.

Whether you agree or disagree with some of his opinions (I usually find myself nodding at the monitor in agreement), he's always tactful and supports his arguments well.

SJgallery - A PHP Image Gallery

I've released the PHP script I've been using to power the gallery section of my site under a public domain (i.e. free) license. It's not for everyone; you should be comfortable with editing XML and HTML files with a text editor, as well as using FTP to upload files to your webhost.

Still, I think there are some web-savvy artists out there who may find it useful. Check it out here.

More tracks and wires

More streetcar wires and tracks at the corner of Roncesvalles and Queen.

Wires and Tracks at King and Dufferin

This one shows the typical tangled insanity of wires and tracks at corners where streetcar lines intersect.

Billboard

Just east of Roncesvalles on Queen, some giant billboards are perched atop these old apartment building rooftops.

Another one for the Parkdale Sketches series.

Slipstream

Slipstream is another series of that I've been working on recently. Slightly sci-fi in theme, I've been drawing them on 24x18 newsprint using conte, then shooting them with a digital camera and adding colours in Photoshop.

This latest drawing is called Apocalypse Summer, based on the theory that global warming may eventually cause the gulfstream to shut down, ushering in a new ice age in parts of North America and Europe. (Though to be fair, there are also those that say otherwise.)

Parkdale Sketches

I've started working in a different part of town this summer, in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. I've been doing some sketches of the nearby area with a cartridge ink brush.

This latest drawing is of my friend James, on his '85 Honda Shadow, in the parking lot behind our office/warehouse building.

By the way, the brush I'm using is a Pentel Pocketbrush. I highly recommend it if you want to experiment with ink & brush, but want the convenience of a felt-tip pen. Please Pentel, don't stop making these things.

Welcome to my mind

So I thought I'd catch up to the 20th century and start up a blog of my own. I've had my own site for a long time now and I've hung out at and posted stuff at other sites (like DeviantArt for example) but I thought this would be a good way to list new artworks, write about them and anything else that happens to pop into my head at the moment.