AARON LINTON

These are illustrations for a story I was developing about a bird who gets trapped in the library. She decides the method for her escape must lie in one of the books and sets out to read them all. It was inspired by a bird I saw hanging out in the Toronto Reference Library.

When you think of a pirate, what comes to mind?

It’s stealing stuff off the internet, of course. Here is my depiction of your typical internet pirate type, doing their thing by the light of a computer.

I found this log and it looked like a mountainside to me. I bought some faux fur, grabbed some LEDs I had lying around and the rest just came together.

I liked the idea of a kid sleeping soundly while the monster under his bed was wide awake in fear.

To exaggerate the bird’s-eye view perspective, I built the room with slanted walls.

I was playing with the idea of nature fusing with technology. Maybe once we’re gone, they will evolve together.

I decided to create a skull a day for a month. I starting seeing skulls shapes in everything. Repetition forces you to push the theme, playing with different styles and rethinking what constitutes the iconic object.

I was invited to do a series of ‘art comics’ for Carousel Magazine’s 4 panel section. I decided to use found objects to ground the strips, referencing the nature of the objects in the stories somehow. I had always wanted to do a comic strip with match books. Their shape reminded me of comic panels. So, I started there.

You can check out a myriad of ‘art comic’ experiments at Carousel’s sister site 4panel.ca .

A friend was having a birthday party for his son and I needed a card, so I put this together.

The shape of a skull jumped out at me while looking at a reel to reel tape machine. I liked the idea and played up the dials and levels as nose and teeth.

For the T-shirt design, I decided to emphasize the skull with a silhouetted head behind the tape machine. I liked the robotic feel of the design but it became more robot skull than tape machine. So, I added the text to reference back to the original idea. It was inspired by a little girl I overheard in the park, who was hiding from her parents.

In the el Rayo-X shirt, I was initially trying to incorporate the word ‘X-ray’ into the T-shirt design. After trying some different ideas, I found I really liked the X at the bottom of the stacked word. That’s when I got the idea to switch the text to Spanish.

For the gooey skull, I felt a green slime colour was only fitting. With the Incredible Hulk in mind, I paired it with a purple shirt.

An alien astronaut in an extraterrestrial landscape. The inspiration came from a futuristic figure I noticed in the bas-relief friezes at the Montreal train station.

I’ve had a fascination with Letraset ever since my Dad gave me a pile of it he’d had since the 60s. I loved the boldness of it and the way it often cracks when you scratch it on. I decided to do a series of designs using only shapes from the Letraset sheets. I built this image around the word GhOSt.

As a kid, I always thought the neighbourhood watch street signs were kind of creepy. Looking at them now, in the age of CCTV, I imagined them as 'War of the Worlds’ style machines surveilling our every move.

I liked the cut-away design of the emergency exit signage on the commuter Go Train. It inspired this art gallery floor plan that was the shell of a body. I decided to lay down the ‘i’ in eXit to mimic the design.

What is left after our exit?

This was my first involved photo setup. A symbiotic miniature world - part being, part city - inhabited by ants.

I found this dead plant on the shore of Lake Simcoe that reminded me of a miniature tree. I imagined it covered in little ghosts in place of leaves. I started mass producing iconic ghost shapes with scraps of cotton and white glue. Soon I had the tree covered.

The ghosts inspired another idea and I reused them for a piece called Ghost Cloud.

A cauldron’s eye view of the Wayward Sisters from Macbeth. I couldn’t resist the devil horns. You know these ladies worship metal.

OOoooooohhhhh!! That’s Scary!

-Count Floyd

Fun with numbers. Is it a 6 or a 9?

From the Skull-a-Day series, this is my first experiment with getting a design embroidered on a hat.

A giant cat hidden in plain sight, waiting to pounce.