Sometimes it's good to work in a method you normal wouldn't consider the best for the project at hand. Breaking free of your creative routine is an important tool, not only in refreshing your artwork, but also in making new discoveries. If you just stick with what you know, then you will grow extremely familiar with that, but never actually grow as a whole.

Personally, I often find it difficult to disregard the "proper" methods of drawing and working, fused inside of me from schooling and experience. For example, no matter how much I try to draw like a child, it is never anything as unique, innocent and unrestrained as a real five year old would actually produce.
To break free, I like to just grab a random medium, and start to create, without any burden or expectation of producing something great. Shown here is a recent sketchbook doodle looking out the studio window, done in large pink oil pastel. The pastel specifically forced me to ignore details and realism and just draw away. It's certainly no masterpiece, but rewarding all the same.

Having recently done another personal website redesign, I wanted to take a peak backwards to see how far the web has come. And really, what a difference over ten years makes! I think my first website was about circa 1999 or so, and from then, I've had four illustration site versions, and two design site versions, before integrating them this year. There is only one version I can't seem to find any files for. Obviously my own design and web work has improved over time, since, thankfully, I'm not in high school anymore. My visual interests as well, have morphed, shuffling among infographics, doodles and clean advertising looks.

The most amazing thing though, is the speed at which web technology evolves. At first, there was nothing but plain html to set-up your website with. All tables and nothing but. Then along came Flash which was hailed as the heroic smasher of restrictive web chains. Then came all sorts of graphic heavy ways of slicing up Photoshop files to get something that actually looked cool. The real gamechanger of the past five years has been CSS. The ability to distinguish presentation from content, and lay an entire site out in a clean, unrestricted fashion and then make easy changes across the site is a remarkable development. Lately everyone has seemed to turn against Flash, but it's still going strong, along with countless other impressive technologies like Ajax, asp, Jquery, CMSs, blogging and social media. Throw the newcomer html5 into the mix and it's pretty much the wild wild web all over again.

A study in the philosophy that less-is-more, Tomine creates visuals with subtle yet highly competent brush work. His inking creates depth and emotion, all while not even seeming to be there. And his colour work isn't half bad either!