Hello! I am Mike, and I call myself a sketchbook artist. Much of my creation happens within a 8×6″ sketchbook, and it’s largely done with some cheap markers and a nice pink pen or two. Throughout the month-long artsUNITE Unmute: Virtual Artist Residency I had my sketchbook in hand. Here is what I created:

This was created at our first residency artist meeting. We were prompted to present ourselves and our practice however we wanted. I decided I’d sketch the other artists during our meeting. Lucky for me I was randomly chosen to go last, so I was able to finish the image enough for people to actually see where I was going with it. I took screenshots of all the residents and then completed the drawing after the meeting.

I did decide it’d be nice to clean the drawing up a bit and make something more polished out of it, so I made this image.

This next spread comes out of the first meeting I had with my mentor Colleen Macisaac. I was very excited to have the support of Colleen as they too are a multidisciplinary illustrator, with a practice in performance and theatre that incorporates their illustration abilities.

The right-hand page was created during my meeting with them, while the left hand page was created based off of a prompt from them. Can you guess which number I rolled?

These pages were created as a part of a collaborative jam with residency artists Morgan Moats and Shazia Ahmad. We attempted to fuse our practices together as a response to another piece created in the jam, so I was basically drawing with my sketchbook flipped outwards while Morgan strummed on their guitar. Performance art is hard y’all.

These drawings were picked away at while listening to residency artists present, or during workshops. Drawing during presentations/talks allows me to engage with subjects matter in a focused manner. From K-12 my teachers always knocked me for it, but I promise I’m listening!

The page on the left is from an exercise led by Mona El Husseini. It’s a blind-drawing and written portrait of my cat. The second page is from the creative jam I mentioned above. A part of this jam was to respond to images created by other artists within our residency. This trio was inspired by the first three images shown to us — a playful mural by me, a fluffy pink soft image by Julia Rose Sutherland, and a pattern-filled, plant-centered painting by Shazia Ahmad.

This is the final image created, again as a response to Colleen’s dice adventure exercise. This was created during the Unmute Residency Showcase that occurred over an hour-ish. Have a peek at Colleen’s exercise and see if you can guess which one I rolled!