Emporium Blog

The colour saturation of the world is something to behold. I'm old enough to remember black and white newspapers. However, there is something to be seen in a picture that isn't formed from a stochastic mix of pin sized dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

As I worked my way up from an eleven dollar paint set on card stock - I really relished every increment in quality. Paper makes an incredible difference, as higher weight papers have greater capacity to hold moisture, handle transitions, and survive rich washes of colour. I've been using Winsor & Newton watercolour pads and been very happy with the quality.  For most paintings the undersketches are done with a number of pens - a vintage Parker with Noodler's Polar Black, a Noodler's Ahab with Noodler's Lexington Gray, and a white Lamy Safari that is loaded with a UV ink...

Since the early 2000s, I've been making landscapes of one kind or another. They've evolved from basic, almost MS paint like:  To more graphic, colour blocked images: To more polygonal presentations similar to Kym Greeley's amazing paintings:

I began a commercial / hobby project launching toddler focused games into the app stores across iOS, Android and Amazon starting in 2015. It was never meant as a particularly commercial venture, but I didn't realize at the time how much effort was needed to make an app from scratch or to appropriately publicize that kind of work. Of the three apps built, the most polished was called ABC planet, in which you could build sequences of letters and then play with them on a rotating scratch table, altering the playback speed of the audio for the letter.