Recent Art and Vacation Wrap-Up

In July 2023 I did an outline of a razor blade on Kurtis’ ankle. As you can see, it's pretty rough, with some double lines, and some less-than-full lines. Kurtis was well warned what he was getting into. I did two other tattoos that same day, and came up with the name “Janky Tats” for my tattoo endeavours.

This past July I filled in Kurtis’ razor blade with black. Kinda. This is the first colour fill I’ve ever done and, while I was pretty comfortable with it on fake skin, the process on real skin is far more difficult to get accurate. He’ll have to come back to get full coverage.

I also did the three Gengar smiles, which were quick and easy, and I only screwed up the last one (the top one) with the left eye.

L’s been on vacation for the past two weeks, so we took advantage and did some camping and touring. We went to Bon Echo Provincial Park, a place I’d only been with my family as a child, and was entirely new for Laura. This was L and I’s first camping trip alone!

We arrived at the campground after driving through blinding rain and a tornado warning. We picked up some firewood then drove to our site, where we sat in the car for a half hour to wait out the worst of the storm. When the rain abated enough, we quickly put up our tent, adding a tarp on top to make it extra water resistant.

We had s’mores a plenty, including L’s favourite: Celebration cookies, with fresh raspberries, and a molten marshmallow.

We did some short hikes, including one only accessible via water vessel, which was also our only access to data reception while we were in the park. We stopped on the trail for a good ten minutes as we caught up with messages and downloaded a backlog of spooky podcasts to fall asleep to. We even had a cheese and charcuterie picnic lunch in the canoe.

All photos above by Laura.

We also took a day trip to Prince Edward County, a small-town peninsula known for it’s many, many wineries and its peculiar, incredibly popular beach Sandbanks. L had visited last year with a friend and wanted to share the experience with me, so we went on a whirlwind tour.

We started at Three Dog Winery and shared two flights with charcuterie. This turned out to be our favourite winery of the trip, and reflected as much in our purchases.

We next visited downtown Picton, the main urban area in the county. It had absolutely beautiful old homes and a perfectly quaint main stretch. We went into a few shops, including Books & Company, a book store with a resident cat.

Next we made our way to Waupoos Estates Winery where we shared another flight and wandered the vineyard being silly. We followed that with Lighthall Vineyards, which took a winding, backroads drive to get to. We had another flight here, with some excellent house cheeses, and found a couple more favourites among their wines.

We really wanted to make it to the PEC Lavender farm L had been to previously, so we headed North, then West. The business day in PEC is roughly 10 am to 5 pm, and we’d arrived at our first destination around 11:30, so while we were leisurely enjoying each stop, we were tearing ass between stops to reach all our intended destinations.

Once we’d finished up at the lavender farm, we looked for a final winery to visit. Sandbanks Estate Winery was close, but we knew we could get that at any LCBO, so with a little searching we found Norman Hardie Winery, which also promised pizza. Three Dog Winery had pizza in their Maps listing, but it turns out they only serve it on weekends, and this was a Monday. So we drove 10 minutes over to Norman Hardie, shared a flight of white, red, and orange, then received a few more glasses of reds to complete the story of the wines. A little sauced at this point, we thanked our delightful sommelier, bought a few more bottles, and wandered back down the hill to the restaurant portion of the winery to dine on some delicious wood-fired pizza.

After that meal and brief rest, we drove East to Wellington, where we stopped in at Midtown Brewing Co. to make up a six-pack of sour beers, get some gas, and move on. Wellington is a tiny, adorable village with a significant tourist economy.

Our final stop was the Sandbanks beach, to feel the soft, fine sand between our toes before we hit the road.

It was a lovely time, and we felt bougie as hell.

All photos above by Laura, except the ones of her, which were taken by me.

We went for an easy hike around Pink Lake (which is actually a gorgeous emerald colour). I’m pretty sure I’ve done the hike before, possibly in CÉGEP, but it was Laura’s first time and we both loved it. We heard at least five different languages as we passed different groups on the hike. Parking was quite the ordeal. It’s obviously quite the tourist attraction.

After the hike, inspired by the tornado warnings we received on the way to Bon Echo, we decided to go see Twisters. It was exactly what we were hoping for, a glorious summer blockbuster. It quite possibly was better than the original. The characters were more fleshed out and well rounded. The effects were fantastic. The janky, homemade tech was lots of fun (I’m still thinking about the truck-locking auger system a week later). The climax was ludicrous and improbable, but still edge-of-your-seat tense.

Since roughly May I’ve been helping to playtest Paul Hubans’ Madhouse every once in a while. A couple of weeks ago I decided to try my hand at redesigning the title logo and posted it in the game’s Discord fanart channel. Paul liked it so much he wanted to use it for the game, so I went about animating it with the changes he requested. This is the final result:

I finally downloaded Nomad Sculpt on my iPad Pro this weekend and played around with it. The first thing I did was sculpt the same weird demon face I always seem to sculpt when I’m trying out a 3D sculpting tool.