There’s a question that sits at the centre of the Royale Canadian Artist Collection, a simple one, really: what feels like home to you?
For me, that answer has never been straightforward. I grew up in South Africa, moved to Toronto, and eventually found myself standing beside the Atlantic in Halifax wondering why it felt so immediately right. The ocean had something to do with it. So did the streets, the public spaces, the way certain city corners hold their own kind of quiet.
That personal story is what The Coast picked up on in their feature this month. Writer Warren D’Silva spent time with me exploring how Halifax became home, how that shaped the two sketches I created for Royale, and what it means to put a place you love on a product that ends up in households across Canada.
Read the full feature at The Coast.
The two sketches, the Halifax Public Gardens and Peggy’s Cove, were chosen because together they tell the story I wanted to tell. The Gardens is about stillness in the middle of a city, the way you can step through those iron gates and feel the noise disappear. Peggy’s Cove is about something older and more elemental, a working fishing village before it became an icon, the kind of location that reminds you why people came to this coast in the first place.
I’ve written about each sketch in more detail here on the blog. The Public Gardens post gets into why that particular corner of Halifax made it into the collection, and the Peggy’s Cove post talks through the design thinking behind how the lighthouse and the village relate to each other on the box.
The Halifax Public Gardens: My First Sketch for the Royale Canadian Artist Collection
Peggy’s Cove: My Second Sketch for the Royale Canadian Artist Collection
The Royale Canadian Artist Collection is a limited-edition run featuring five Canadian artists, eight designs, and a single shared question answered differently by each of us. You’ll find it on shelves across the country now.
If you’ve picked one up, or spotted it at a store near you, I’d love to know. Tag me at @downtownsketcher on Instagram.