Design Styles
The Lazy River has taken on a new focus for 2025, working primarily in three different styles - Southwest BC, Abstractions, and Low Humour. Each style reflects a different aspect of my creative process. Of course, other types of designs will slip through every now and then, and for those I will be creating a Sundry category, a grab bag of whatever catches my fancy.
British Columbia's Southwest
I'm very fortunate to live in one of the most attractive places in the world, British Columbia's southwest corner. Currently, we live in Burnaby, a municipality that shares a border with Vancouver. I was born and raised in Victoria, just across the water, on Vancouver Island. As a kid and a teenager, I spent a lot of time on the Gulf Islands, mostly Saltspring, Thetis, and Saturna.
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The designs in this series have been inspired by my experiences here and the beauty that surrounds me every day.
British Columbia's Southwest
Abstractions
I absolutely love making abstract designs. In the past, I achieved this by extreme image deconstruction and processing - an example of this is the image above, under the title for this section. Nowadays, I use Midjourney to explore abstract themes, a purpose for which it is very well suited.
Low Humour
I am a dad. By law, I am obligated to indulge in groan-inducing dad jokes. I also have a quirky, offbeat and often dark sense of humour that was formed after many years of consuming such comedy greats as Monty Python, the Kids in the Hall, the Young Ones, the Mighty Boosh and many more. I was tempted to not include this design category in the Lazy River's more focused direction, as West Coast and Abstract designs can intermingle very easily, while Humour as a category feels outside of that partnership. But who am I kidding? Without somewhere to offer these punny, weird and incongruous bits I might explode.
In early October of 2021, I decided to set a design challenge for myself - a new t-shirt design every two days until I ran out of juice, all of them celebrating (in a very tongue-in-cheek way) the infamous "War on Christmas." I managed to crank out just over 20 of them, and the best of these are presented here. More to come!
