EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 31 © 2020 Book Palace Books * 96 PAGES in FULL edition

3 FOLLOWING PAGE: Mother of Dragons , acrylic on wood panel, 2013. Done for a group show at Mondo Gallery based on the popular TV series Game of Thrones . “My wife posed for this piece, matching the lighting to a photo of Daenerys.” I grew up watching the same Saturdaymorning cartoons and had the same toys.” He has recently opened a new market, which he created, with landscape, cine‐ matic-like paintings of eyes. He got the idea while driving one day. “I sawmy re‐ flection in the rear-view mirror, and the way that image was cropped, felt like a format for a painting. Very cinematic-like, as in a Kubrick filmwith the close-up on the eyes,” he recounted. These paintings represent the eyes of monsters, vil‐ lains and characters from different genres of American pop culture that have made thema particular fan-favourite. The paintings are all done at the actual size of the characters if they were alive, on a one to one ratio scale. “I’ll also paint the monsters at a larger size when they are bigger, so I once did a painting of King Kong [the crop-framing of his eyes] which was eight feet wide,” he explained. Born in a suburb of Toronto, Canada, forty-six years ago, Jason Edmiston has always lived there. “I’ve only lived in two houses my whole life.” Early on he dis‐ covered he had a knack for drawing and, influenced by the comic strips he read in the newspapers, such as Garfield , and Calvin and Hobbes , and the cartoons he saw every Saturday morning on TV, he would use his artistic talents at school by rendering many of these characters for his chums. “I was good at that, which was