This is a holiday wreath I made by upcycling holiday mail advertising. I used the ads as leaves of a pointsetta, and used beads from a broken neckace as the center, and finished it off with a nice light spray of matte white spray paint.

I especially love the places where you can still see the text underneath the paint.  This pretty piece of paper art was given as a gift for the holidays.

Here is the 2009 Holiday eCard that I created for Dimentians (the company I work for). This animation from concept to finish was completed in a mere three days. The idea was to incorporate my recent upcycling collage inspirations and use the design magazines that I had on my desk at work from HOW, Veer & Wired. ENJOY!

I make cookies every year during the holidays, but this years season for celebrating coincided with my sisters purchase of her first home. Her holidays will be spent renovating her house, so I thought I would make her renovation / winter ginger cookies. I was told the wrench looks a bit like a dog biscuit.

This is the first upcycle collage for my Japanese Obake (monster) series. I will create different collages depicting different Obake derived from Japanese folklore.

This is collage is of Rokurokubi, which are ordinary people by day, but transform into long necked creatures at night, often frightening people and creating terror.

This collage was created out of the HOW magazine paper product advertising inserts.

I was super excited when my business cards from MOO.com arrived. They are printed on 100% recycled paper, and are matte and super fine! For the backside I used images featured on this blog, and on the frontside information for both the professional and personal (I couldn’t decide which side to promote, so I decided it would be clever to show both and seperate the two with a dotted cut line down the middle). Now I just need to find people to give them out too.

This is a drawing I did about the Japanese Teru Teru Bozu. I’ve used a variation of this character illustration for my printed cards and silk screened t-shirts as well.

Here’s a definition of from Wikipedia:

Teru teru bozu (Japanese: “shiny-shiny Buddhist priest”^[1]) is a little traditional hand-made doll made of white paper or cloth that Japanese farmers began hanging outside of their window by a string. This amulet is supposed to have magical powers to bring good weather and to stop or prevent a rainy day. “Teru” is a Japanese verb which describes sunshine, and a “b?zu” is a Buddhist monk (compare the word bonze), or in modern slang, “bald-headed.”

This project no. 10 is created out of the HOW magazine paper product advertising inserts from the February 2005 issue.

This collage was inspired by Hiroshige Hokusai’s Geisha wood block print. I loved all the layers of the kimono and creating the lines in the hair with cut outs, revealing the colour of the paper behind as the lines. I also had some liberties with my interpretation, for instance, I reversed the image, and used different colours and textures for the background and kimono accessories (this however was limited to what paper I had available from this issue).

This collage was a bit more time consuming and detailed than some of the previous collages that I have made, but the final results were oh so satisfying that I don’t mind that I spent my Sunday morning getting covered in glue and paper scraps.

Check out the rest of the collage pieces in the gallery so far.

This project no. 9 is created out my old birthday cards given to me over the past 2 years.

I thought the bamboo was fitting since the paper came from a card to celebrate aging and bamboo are plants that are strong and rejuvenate quickly (what we all wish we could do as we age).

Check out the rest of the collage pieces in the gallery so far.

Pretty kitties.

This project no. 8 is created out of the HOW magazine paper product advertising inserts from the June 2009 issue.

This one was fun to do, I think I could of put so many more things into this collage, but at some point I had to tell myself the age old truth, sometimes less is more.

Check out the rest of the collage pieces in the gallery so far.

It is an old illustration I did depicting me battling Crapzilla, who is composed of all the stuff that broke on me one year. I was inspired to draw this after watching The Story Of Stuff animation, which made me realize how materialism and addicition for consumerism was becoming a negative part, of not only my life, but society in general. I’m still guility of indulging (love my macBook… but that’s work related right?) but the process of sketching this helped ground me a little.