The Best Best Buy Logo Money Could Buy

I worked at Best Buy for just over a year, and I was able to help them out with some promotional material when head office... dragged their heels on occasion.

My brother-in-law currently works for them, in a much higher capacity than I did, and he recently wanted to pump up the morale of the store by giving them a unique brand that they can use to distinguish their store during various promotional events.

Apparently, their store is known as the Monarchs, and he wanted something to incorporate their raw, awesome power. This is what I came up with. I think it looks pretty good in application :)

Thanks for reading!

Save The Date!

Sooo much of my life these days is taken up by working on escape room design and prop making that I don't know how to... unlock my free time!!

*ahem*

Because of my affinity for the medium, last month I was requested by a wonderful mom to help do something special for a wedding shower - a portable escape room for the bride and groom! Once I stopped squealing, I humbly accepted.

The game prepped for transport to the party

It was a surprising amount of work, but I had great support from an escape room mentor. Puzzle flow had me confused at first, and there were some puzzles in there that needed A LOT of playtesting, but I think the results were just fantastic.

The happy couple

 What was great about this project is that it's something that I own, so while I've done... 5 different escape rooms in the last year and a half, I can talk about this one without spoiling some information that I don't own.

Puzzlers gonna puzzle

As an added bonus, with a little tweaking I think turning this game a little more generic can make it something more people can play in the future :)

Thanks for reading!

Hail To The King, Baby

I don't know if this has ever come up, but I love board games. At least two of the "always on the plate" projects I have kicking around here are to design my own games. I'll get those done, some day, eventually... but in the last few years Carla and I have been thrown head-first into the world of Eurogames (the fancy ones you see and are like 'that one looks to hard') and I can tell you that it is becoming a heavily saturated market.

What's great, then, is when a friend commissions you to make a custom set of character pieces for one of the coolest games out there, King of Tokyo. It's basically battle Yahtzee where players use giant monster to vie for control of Tokyo. Lots of fun.

For a mutual friend's birthday, we made him a custom set of monster cards (based on his friends and family), and a few new special power cards for him to mess around with. We played it and it rolled out amazingly thanks to the hand crafting of Jared and the Photoshop skills of Kurt.

In all respect and fairness, the basis for the art was found and lovingly altered from the artwork of Brian Allen, and we have no intention of selling it again or making any profit from it, we just REALLY liked it :)

Happy birthday Adam, and thanks for reading!

More Than One Way To Skin A Design

I really like making people happy with my designs.

Like the big robot in the sky once said: See A Need... Fill A Need. Often I have clients that come to me and say that they have Event X coming up, and need Y to make it special. We're then able to sit and talk about what sort of theme, or 'skin' works best for Event X.

Most times people know exactly what they want, sometimes they need help turning their ideas into tangible things, and sometimes I have free rein. In this case, I was somewhere in the middle of all three. We had a baby shower coming up, and Carla needed games to play with the ladies. The mom-to-be is a big Batman fan, and the dad is a Superman freak.

I do not own any of the images used, trademarks of DC / Warner Brothers, etc...



Sometimes, it's too easy :)

Thanks for reading!

I Saved A Seat, Just For You :)

The CRUX Of The Matter....

... is that I've got some very exciting news.

So I've been off the grid for a while, hammering out some small things here and there in typical artistic fashion, but the BULK of my time has been going to a semi-secret project that I can finally talk about!

So, in case you were unaware, I like designing. And I like puzzles. And I've learned that I really like escape / adventure rooms. Turns out that through some delightful happenstance I've been able to actually design an escape room. A good friend of mine who's made his way into the Southern Ontario escape room community (yes, that is actually a thing. I was surprised too) got the opportunity to manage his own escape room for a company called CRUX. He's brilliant with puzzle concept, but not with the art, and offered me the chance to fill the room with all the things!

We've been working on this now for a few months, and soft opened last weekend, but as I was hanging out tonight putting up some final stickers we had our FIRST walk-in customers! It's been insane to see this as an empty building to puzzle concepts to to construction and everything in between.

Unfortunately, this is the one of the few projects I can't preview here, as it might ruin some of the puzzles of the room, and blow the surprise the theme, but I CAN tell you our first room is called Dead Air.

With total bias, I recommend you check out our Facebook page, and if you like what you see, pop over to the CRUX's website and see about setting up a booking. We are making new rooms, and I solemnly swear that this won't turn into only advertising for the room, but it's the only way you're going to see my art this time ;)

Thanks for reading!

Denver, The Foam Dinosaur

Remember these?

I do! I used to love these growing up. I had a few of them, and I remember putting them together, and then moving to more complicated ones. Once I started working with foam again, and piecing together the sections of the Stargate, I remembered putting together these puzzles and thought "Hey! Let's combine these things!"

So I found a pattern like this...

...printed them large format, and then used that as a template to make much bigger foam pieces out of them...

...and unearthed this old beast! A special thank you to my lovely assistant who held the tail down. The structural stability of the final product wasn't as good as the old wooden ones, and was way too top heavy. Learnings for next time!

As always, thanks for reading :)