west

Well, now! Everything I’ve read says to fill this out as completely as possible, so here goes nothing…

I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is a great city, although I could be biased as I grew up here and, despite having moved around a bit, have spent most of my life here. There is a lot to see and do, and its a nice-looking place that doesn’t smell funny.

Also, as I live in Canada, I tend to say “eh” a lot, and spell things using the superfluous letter “u,” such as colour, favour, favourite, umbrella, etc.

I’m married to a wonderful woman who puts up with my nonsense, so I’m extremely lucky. I became interested in SwapBot through my wife, happy lil artist, who is an avid Swapper. We have the same mailing address, but don’t panic; we’ve already cleared the same address thing with the moderator.

I am an animator, and have worked in the animation industry for the past decade. I work primarily in television animation. Most people have never heard of the shows I’ve worked on, however I had the great fortune to work on two well-known shows: Caillou and Toot & Puddle (anyone with small children have likely heard of these). It’s a fun industry to work in, and I love what I do.

My hobbies include (get ready for the longest grammatically incorrect sentence ever): drawing (I have a huge love of drawing, mainly cartoons and comics), sculpting (cartoony-looking things, mainly using sculpey/fimo-type clay), music (I heart my iPod!!!), video games (I have an Xbox 360, PSP, PS2, PS3, and Wii - I especially love the Ratchet & Clank series, Katamari, and more hardcore games like God of War), playing guitar, reading, my pets (a dog and two cats), baking (my peanut butter chocolate chip cookies bring down the house…that’s really all I bake, though, so one would hope I’d at least be good at it), and watching movies & TV.

I’ll listen to just about anything. However, I do have my particular favourites: Cake, The White Stripes, The Rolling Stones, The Tragically Hip, Ani Difranco, Led Zeppelin, Death From Above 1979, Tilt, The Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Metallica, Belle & Sebastian…um, if I keep going we’ll be here all day, so let’s just say I love music. I especially like learning of lesser-known bands, of the type that become popular mainly through word-of-mouth. I found out about Ani Difranco this way, and her stuff is amazing! So if anyone wants to pass along a “hey, have you listened to (insert band/artist name here)?” that would be super.

I especially like fiction. Hmm…that’s pretty broad, so here’s some authors I like:

Michael Crichton Ken Follett (oh, the character development! Magnifique!) Stuart Macbride Mo Hayder J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series) Rick Riordan (the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series…if you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for??) Suzanne Collins (the Hunger Games series is amazing)

I also enjoy comics, or I suppose they’re called graphic novels now. I especially enjoyed Bone, and Y the Last Man.

I group comic strips in the reading category, too. My favourites are: Calvin and Hobbes (the best comic strip ever), Pooch Café, Get Fuzzy and Sherman’s Lagoon.

I love movies. I’ll watch just about anything: I like movies where things move slowly but its all about character development, as well as movies in which lots of things blow up. And of course animated movies are great, too! Especially anything by Pixar.

Some of my favourites: Jurassic Park, all James Bond movies, Shaun of the Dead, The Incredibles, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Cats Don’t Dance (this one didn’t do well in theatres, I believe, but it is amazing!), Sleepy Hollow, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Harry Potter series, Supersize Me, and just about everything Michael Moore does.

I love drawing. I generally draw in pencil, and may or may not ink what I’ve drawn, although lately I'm drawing just in pen more and more. Holy run-on sentence, Batman! Pen is faster, and then I don't have to carry a sharpener everywhere I go. I also love sketchbooks. Sometimes I go to art stores just to ogle the paper and pencil aisles. And usually buy something. Its hard to resist a shiny new sketchbook. I’m very interested in any swaps that involve drawing anything. I love Artist Trading Cards, and Zentangles are pretty cool, too...one of the first swaps I signed up for was a Zentangle ATC swap, so that was two birds with one stone!

Monsters, pirates and pirate images (skull & crossbones, etc), Dr. Seuss, Tim Burton-style art, robots, dogs, tattoos, spirals, chocolate, The Works (awesome burger place that I think only exists in Ottawa), cool art other people have made, www.creaturebox.com, exercising (especially weightlifting), the colours blue, green, brown, black, and grey, acting ridiculous (especially if I can get my wife to laugh at me), skate shoes (Vans are awesome…oddly I’ve only been on a skateboard once in my life), coffee, superheroes (I don’t have a vast knowledge of these, I just think they’re awesome), Ugly Dolls, the 2010 winter Olympic mascots (especially Quatchi!!!), Picasso, wandering around downtown Ottawa, snow, any awesome cartoony images or products.

...anything overly frilly or pink…I’m a dude, after all. Unless of course there’s some sort of irony/cleverness involved that is related to the swap. Also dolls freak me out. And clowns. No freaky clown dolls. Especially if they’re pink. Or frilly. Or both.

Glitter. Gets. Everywhere. Please do not send anything with glitter on it. In my experience, you just have to look at glitter and it goes viral. As I am not a pretty fairy princess, I do not want to be sparkly.

Thanks to my wife, happylilartist, for letting me use this mailing information she compiled.

Delivery from Canada to elsewhere in North America takes approximately 5 -10 business days for most letters and small packages, so please be sure to allow enough time for delivery. If you are outside North America, please allow sufficient time for delivery for your country (2-6 weeks), and use my "sent" date as an indicator for when to expect your mail.

Canada Post does not process mail on weekends - so there is no saturday mail deliveries and no weekend postmarking, so please go by my "sent" date for an item being sent on time, and not solely on a postmark date. Ie, If I mail something on a sunday and the deadline falls on a sunday, it won't be processed in the mail center until a monday (when it hopefully receives it's postmark) but it was actually mailed on time.

Alright, this site should be fun. Flakers are not fun.

Lady Kianna flaked on me for the Groovy Guitar ATC swap. Huge thanks to jj9jj for angelling this swap for me (angel sent and received).