My grandmother told me this story herself, and I've never forgotten it. It is about when as a 12 year old, she would drive a wagon full of itinerant harvest workers back to the family farm from the train station. She did it alone, at night, 6+ totally strange men in the open prairie . It was so dark she told me that she just just let the horses find their own way home! I have been working on this idea for a while now and I'm finally getting around to painting it. I'm going to call it "TRUST". I asked her straight out if she'd been scared or if she ever thought she might be in danger? She said no. That it genuinely never crossed her mind. She figured that if anything went wrong, "one of the men in the wagon would've stepped in and handled it". That was just how things worked back in the early 30's. I think about that story a lot. I have a 12 year old myself now, and I can't imagine putting her alone in a wagon with six strangers at night, anywhere, for any reason. Not because people were somehow better in 1932. Because something about how much we trusted each other has genuinely changed, and not for the better. I don't say that to be bitter about it. I say it because I think it's worth remembering what we used to have, and maybe worth trying to get some of it back. I want this painting to actually hold up, not just look atmospheric. Two Clydesdale draft horses in period collar-and-hames harness, a 1932 flat-rack hayrack grain wagon, one kerosene barn lantern as the only light in the whole scene. If you know this era, this part of Alberta, or this gear, please tell me what I'm getting wrong or right? This is a large digital painting and prints will be available once it's done. I like telling real Alberta history this way. I have a whole list of stories like this to tell and if you would like to see more images like this, please let me know.

Obi-Wan vs. Darth Maul. I made this image and published it as a free coloring page for fellow Star Wars fans. Free download, link below. If you color it, tag me @mikeperryart, would love to see what people do with it. Non-commercial fan art, but yours to enjoy freely.

Story time. Back in university in the early 2000s, there was a student in my program obsessed with technical drawing, specifically isometric projection and exploded-view illustration. The kind of thing you'd see in a vintage parts catalog or a service manual.

It's stuck with me for twenty years. Real technical mastery, the kind that takes obsessive trial and error to earn, wasn't something our program had any framework for valuing. If it didn't look like expressive fine art, it didn't count.