About
As a child, I always wanted to be a Mountie (as in “Royal Canadian Mounted Police “) but when I discovered that they didn’t get to ride horses all the time and didn’t get to wear those nifty red coats everyday (red being my favorite color as a child) I decided that the next best thing was being a cartoonist.
Over the years, I’ve been involved in greeting card design, logo design, animation, newspaper editorial cartooning, book illustration and a plethora (that’s a great word that you just can’t slide into every conversation) of related projects.
As a sidebar you might be interested to know that I was also the co-creator of the comic book hero, Captain Canuck. http://chapterhouse.ca
I discovered the internet in early 1996 and decided that it was time to put away my crayons and see if I couldn’t put my talents to work digitally. Good cartoon clip art on the net was sorely lacking and that became my focus.
I had been teaching junior high up to that point and so I continued to teach by day while cartooning nights and weekends. It wasn’t until 2003 that I finally put my teaching career behind me and devoted myself full time to Toonaday and custom cartooning.
I taught junior high from 1981 to 2003, starting out teaching art and french. Later as technology evolved I moved into teaching computer graphics. At the time, there was really no set curriculum so I created my own curriculum from scratch, teaching my students the basics of Pagemaker, CorelDraw and Corel PaintShop Pro.
In junior high in our system you’re considered a generalist and so at one point I was called upon to teach typing. I’m a lousy typist but thank goodness for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I had to be pretty fast on my feet though when kids would ask me how fast I could type.
In 2013 I stumbled on TpT and quickly put up 3 whole clipart sets. It wasn’t until a couple of fellow TpT creators discovered my store and encouraged me to add more sets to the store, that I started to look at it seriously. Thank you Margaret and Ruth.
I’ve been told that my clipart isn’t childish and works really well with older students in middle and high school and that’s gratifying. But I believe they work well with all ages. At least that’s my focus.
If you want slightly quirky clipart with a sense of humor that will bring a smile to your students, then you’ve come to the right place.
Ron