A Bright New Future

Life is a beautiful thing where anything can happen. It is often through change that our lives become more fulfilling. For when things stay the same they become stagnant and dull. Now I'm not saying our lives were dull and that we needed change, it's just that for us it was time to take the next step. Of course we could have done it sooner or maybe even at a later date but the timing was right for us to get engaged now. Yes, you heard me right, we are engaged. I proposed to my one and only, my muse, my inspiration. We have always talked about getting married and knew in our hearts that we would always be together. So it was only natural for us to make our commitment known to others as well. We both just finished a year at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada in the field of art and it just seemed right to continue with our journey through life together by binding our love for each other.

We are so over joyed at being able to call each other fiance and fiancee. Did you know there are different meanings for fiance and fiancee, not just different ways to spell it, I didn't. I found out that it is fiance for the man and fiancee for the woman. So if my fiancee were to refer to me in writing she would use fiance, like I just did for her in the beginning of this sentence. By the way, I have no clue how to add that little thingy above the letter "e". 

We had the most beautiful day for the proposal. I guess God was blessing us that day. We went to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario, Canada. If you ever get the chance to go there, please do, it is just beautiful. At the time we went it was nearing the end of summer so I'm sure at the peak of season it is even more beautiful. Also, make sure to bring your camera for there will be plenty of moments that you will want to capture for your albums. In fact we didn't get to see all that there is to see so make sure to leave plenty early so that you don't miss out.

It took a while for us to find the right place, but with a little help from God we found the perfect site for our proposal. There is more than one garden to see and I believe we only had enough time to see two of them. The one we proposed at was called the Laking Garden and we had it all to ourselves. You are probably wondering how can that be when there must be numerous people that go there every day. Well as luck would have it we like to walk and it was a rather long walk to get to this particular garden. At that time of the day the shuttle buses stopped running to other parks and only the adventurous or young are willing to walk that far. I guess we were the only ones with enough stamina that day. I like to think it was destiny, God had plans for us this day. See we wanted to propose and take photos of our special day. It would have been kind of awkward to have people looking at us and walking into our shots. So it was perfect that we were all alone with as much time as we needed to get all of our shots done. I thank the Lord for that wonderful day because now we have the most beautiful photos we could ever hope for to remember our special day.

Now on to the next step, marriage. We haven't set a date for the big day, just one step at a time. We don't know the exact day, but it won't be too far off. May the Lord bless you like he did for us, making all your dreams come true. Take care and God Bless.

A Wonderful Surprise

It was about half a year ago or more that my girlfriend Rebecca first told me that I should submit my art to ImagineFX. Which is a fantasy and Sci-Fi digital art magazine based in the United Kingdom. It has been a long time favorite of hers and she believed that my art would surely make it into their pages. I wasn't as enthused and was a little apprehensive because the magazine was mainly for digital art. Also I didn't really know where my art belonged. I knew it was fantasy, but not hard core fantasy. In a way it resembled realism, but no where in life would you see the colors or scenery that I created.

So for a long time I procrastinated, which seems to be the norm among many artists. I would always make the excuse that my images aren't good enough, I need to take better pictures or that my art isn't quite what they are looking for. Well, after a few months I finally stopped procrastinating and got around to learning how to best take pictures of traditional art.

After many tedious hours spent editing on photoshop and searching the internet for tips on photography. I finally came up with some files that I felt satisfied with. So I sat down to read the rules of submission for the Reader's FXPose in ImagineFX and sent my images as well as Bio information. It only took until the next day for me to receive a reply from them asking for better quality images. As you can imagine I was quite excited. I thought to myself that if they were going to reject my art then they wouldn't ask for better images. Then again, it also occurred to me that I probably just didn't send a large enough resolution picture. So I followed their instructions and made my images as large as I could and sent them through YouSendIt.com which is an online file sharing website which allows you to send files that are too large for e-mails. After that I never heard a word from them. I assumed they chose another artist and that my gut feeling towards their request for larger images was just wishful thinking on my part. Still I kept hope alive and continually kept a look out for future issues of ImagineFX in hopes of seeing my art inside.

A couple months passed by and I almost gave up hope when my e-mail notifier popped up while I was searching the internet. My notifier allows me to view the first few sentences of an email and what I saw right away was,"I discovered your work in a UK magazine..." That first line made my skin crawl. I thought what magazine? Was my work pirated and printed off as their own, because I've heard several horror stories of that happening to other artist. Then I remembered...UK...that sounded familiar. Could it be the magazine ImagineFX. Truly it had to be, stupid of me to think otherwise. How else could this person contact me if someone else was claiming my work as their own. So I replied to this kind gentleman who was so fond of my work and thanked him profusely as well as asked to which magazine was he referring to. To my amazement he replied that it was the June issue No.57 of ImagineFX. He even quoted some of my statements as well as offered to scan the page for me. You can understand the joy I felt having heard this news as well as finding a new fan of my work.

Now came the question, is it here in Canada as well.? By the way if you didn't know, for the past several months I have been attending school at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Ontario, Canada. They have wonderful programs for those interested in learning more in the fields of art like animation and illustration. Anyway, back to my question, was it in stores in Canada? My search ended up in vain for later I found out that since the magazine was based in the UK it took an extra month for the US and Canada to receive theirs. So now began my agonizing wait and wait I did for it took longer than a month.

My torment ended this last week for I finally got my hands on a copy of issue 57. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the colors printed well, better than my own attempts. I did notice that the images seemed off so I compared them to the originals and found that they were slightly cropped. Which is understandable because they have design and layout issues to deal with in making a magazine. With that minor change I am quite happy with how it turned out. I have my images in an international magazine which will be viewed by thousands of people who will then hopefully go to my website where they can view my work in its entirety. So if you have the time please check out this magazine or my site. Hopefully this is the first sign of many blessings to come and one day I will be called an equal among the favorite artists that I admire.

Thank you for your time and GOD BLESS!!!

Back to School

How is everyone doing this beautiful day? Great I hope!

Not sure if many of you know, but while my girlfriend and I were working on my website we were also working on getting into Sheridan College. Don't know if many of you have heard about it; but it's a well respected art college located in Ontario, Canada not that far away from Toronto. It is mostly known for producing Animators, but is also great in it's other fields such as Illustration. Sheridan overall is just a great school for people that are looking for careers in the Arts. Which is why we decided to go there so we could learn and grow as artists. Also to hopefully get some more exposure in the art community for which we are lacking.

Well, as you can probably guess by the title we have made it in and have now just completed our first week of school. It's interesting being back in a school environment again because it has been awhile since I have gone. One thing for sure is that we are both eager to learn so that makes it far more enjoyable to be back in school again. I've always been a self taught artist, searching and feeling my way through the best I can so that I may express my ideas. It will be nice to learn the things I didn't know, which should help me to improve on my own abilities so that I can further expand on my style of painting.

It's a beautiful school, large and well built. You can basically find anything you need so that you don't need to leave campus. Art supply store, food courts and studios to do your art in. The teachers are all great with diverse backgrounds in the field of art. They are very talented and most do their teaching part time as they still continue to work in their fields of study like animation, illustration or fine art.

We look forward to the following weeks ahead to see how much we can grow as artists. See where this road takes us. It's going to be a fun spring and summer of which we hope to produce wonderful pieces of art. Sometime when I get used to this blogging I will try to add pictures to my post so that you can see what we've been doing.

Thanks for reading. We hope your days ahead are wonderful and full of blessings.

Take care and God Bless! ~ Jonathon