My hand made up-cycled denim collection.

Last summer I got my hand on 100 pairs of vintage Levi’s for $1 each and I got to work.

I started to embroider them and silk screen them too.

Then my hands got sore and the piles of denim weren’t shrinking so I thought about what I could do with them. I started to take the pants apart and decides to make clothing with the pieces. I found patterns on Pinterest and started sewing. A lot less labour-intensive for my hands and I had a lot of fun. This project kept me busy for the first two months of the year and now I have an opportunity to show the entire collection in a fashion show in April.

Stay tuned for details. In the meantime, huge thanks to Jared, Gia and Lauren for modelling for me in the studio one Sunday at the beginning of March. Special thanks to Courtney at Key Models for helping me bring this project to life.

The editorial was published in Selin Magazine ISSUE 26 VOL. 16 available to purchase here.

Vancouver Mural Festival Block Party, this weekend!

Vancouver Mural Festival is hosting a mini-market this weekend at Main and 5th, just behind the hotel.

Guess who will be there as a vendor with her merch on Sunday 10-3? Me!

Want to know what I will have there? Stop by and see me in person, the rest of the summer I will be selling in person only so keep an eye on my blog for my pop-up information. There are three more to go over the next few months. Keep an eye on my Instagram too, there will be information popping up in my stories.

I will have up-cycled clothing featuring my illustrations, pins, stickers and goody bags too.

Square payment is available.

This block party is featuring one of the biggest mural projects the festival has created to date.

You can find out more about it here

Let's take a look at some lights.

I live in a beautiful neighbourhood in Vancouver, nestled right next to the ocean. It is the West End and I love it. I have lived here for 8 years, half the time I have spent in Vancouver and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon. My apartment is a perfect live-work studio for my work and I am nestled in a variety of outdoor backdrops that you can see in a variety of my work.

I wanted to post my gratitude for this holiday season and share with you some of the lights that are placed in my neighbourhood every single year. I took a slow shutter abstract approach, I love when lights make patterns in an image.

Please enjoy this winter interlude of the lights in my community. My neighbourhood.

Look Book sneak peek

Thanks to an army of friends I was able to make a lookbook of my merch.

Here is the text that will be featured in the 14-page final.

Welcome, I am so thrilled to share this Look Book with you. This is an accumulation of the past 5 years.

I have shopped second-hand for most of my adult life and I love it. I started to make continuous line drawings of my images and the lines began to jump off the page. It seemed only natural to put those lines on clothing. William Blake has a quote he created just after the Book of Ruth and it is one that has inspired my work with lines.

'The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life is this: That the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art: and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling... Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. We know each other by our lines.' William Blake

I see the lines of my work as symbols of the connection between each piece that eventually accumulates into a final creation ready for view.

The lines are what hold us and what extend us to each other, without them there is chaos.

I am a multidisciplinary artist who has called Vancouver home for over 16 years. I began taking photos at 12 years old when I got my first point and shoot film camera. I grew up in Halifax with a family full of artisans. I am an editorial and portrait photographer who began using my photos to create continuous line drawings and used those lines to create a collection.

It took an army to help me bring this project to life and to say I am grateful to all of the hands who helped would be an understatement. Producing this book to share this part of my practice with you holds the intention of sharing my passion. This book is just one chapter of many to come and I can't wait to share it with you.

Thank you.

Credits Page

Photography and Creative Direction, Deanna Flinn

@freeadmission @deanna_flinn_photography

Seamstress

Samantha Tran

Models

Xandria, Lauren, Tijana, Sam, Syd, Noah, Sisi

Location

Vancouver, BC

Layout and Design

Emily Choi

Shot on film purchased at Beau Photo, Vancouver, BC.

Film developed and scanned at Rocket Reprographics, Vancouver, BC.

All clothing is purchased at thrift stores and each design featured is drawn by hand by Deanna with original inspiration from photographs she created.

Silkscreening done at The Hive Printing, Vancouver, BC and fabric for original pieces like the Cape and Backpack sourced from Our Social Fabric, Vancouver, BC.

My process

Things are hot and smokey here in Vancouver and I am having a bit of trouble settling in and focusing by sitting in front of my computer now.

I had to think a lot about what to post this week, I am knee-deep in marketing, sorting out my journey and making plans for my next moves, thinking through the need for the next moves and the desires behind them.

Alongside this time of processing plans and feelings, I am working on my virtual artist residency. Drawing, projecting images and drawing so I can practice with spray paint, using water-soluble paint in a refillable pen on vellum over top my large format printed vogue images. A trip to Layout Art Supply to pick up more supplies, spray paint, smaller refillable markers, different types of markers, more water-soluble paint in the colour of purple, some extra nibs for the refillable pen and some extra caps for the spray paint so I can experiment with different types of ways the paint can come out of the can. I am capturing my process during these days of the residency in my Instagram stories, mostly with timelapse videos if you want to come along and see the process unfold. I also created some long-form IGTV videos with specific goals of my process.

I filled out my final application for an artist residency in Montreal this week too. The application needs to be juried and accepted and I will not know for another 10 days so I will have to sit tight and exercise patience.

I think it is worth filling you in on my photographic process at this point because it also drives the rest of my art practice of continuous line drawings. The lines, shapes and the connection created in each image gave me the want to draw the lines to symbolize the process and how we need to connect, now more than ever.

We know each other by our lines, wrote William Blake after The Book of Ruth. He was referring specifically to the bounding lines that keep everything together, the lines that bind us, without them there is chaos. Chaos is unmanageable for anyone, the lines, the connections we have in our lives keep us grounded and keep chaos at bay. With this in mind, my process of planning and executing a shoot can be traced with a line.

I am inspired by an idea and reach out to the agency I work with to select a model to work with and book them. I then find the clothing I want to use during the shoot and print out inspiration images to use during the shoot as inspiration for the model and myself. I use them as a guide to keeping the original idea in mind during the entire process. I also use them as a guide for posing so the model has a reference.

I make JPGS from the shoot after a quick edit in Lightroom and send them to the modelling agency so they can make selects. I also make my own selects and add them to a submission cue. I always work ahead and plan my days by working ahead, planning for me is key.

Then I decide if I want to draw the lines in digital form using procreate and my iPad or if I want to make a print and project the image so I can draw it big or if I want to just use a smaller print and make a drawing with a 4x6. All of these decisions are based back on the original inspiration of the editorial I decided to create.

Turns out sitting down to tell you about my process became a much longer blog post than I intended and I’m glad. Sharing the process with you will also give you a window into where I am moving next with my art practice and my photography.

Each of these series of steps is long and takes a lot of energy. For a long time, I thought I just had to take photos and that was that, it is only now over a decade into this journey do I know and realize that the process is so much more than gaining recognition. The connection for me is the key and in that key is the line I am using to be so grateful for what I do and for me to engage with you.

Thank you for reading this far, I appreciate your support and am so grateful to have you along on my journey.

The images in this post are a recent editorial I created, some expired polaroids and images used in my formal artist residency application.

Party on the Pavement - Neighbourhood Small Grant.

Are you ready?
Are you free September 6th and will you be in Vancouver for the afternoon?

We will be at Bute Street Plaza, at Davie and Bute on the North Side of Davie celebrating being together again with a temporary community engaged mural.

Come grab a piece of chalk and draw yourself into a scene with your neighbour.

Meet someone new, say Hi, connect and celebrate having some fun and flexing a creative muscle you might not have used since you were a kid. I can’t wait.

Special thanks to the West End BIA and Neighbourhood Small Grants for providing me the resources and venue to create this celebration.

I picked up the chalk today, I have 130 pieces of chalk waiting for you. You can have the piece you use to go and draw on pavement somewhere else too. Or pass it on to a neighbour so they can celebrate too.