About
Everett Wilson

Everett Wilson is a freelance illustrator and visual creator. In his day job, he works in the non-profit arts sector, specializing in audience engagement, fund development, and operations. When he’s not helping to bring ideas to life at Wordfest in Calgary, Canada, you’ll catch him making handmade lino-cut prints, creating world-building vector illustrations, publishing a weekly comic called The Push Button Heads, and selling art prints and swag through his online shop. He lives, works, and plays in Calgary (Moh-kins-tsis), Canada.

I hold a Masters of Arts in Communication Studies from the University of Calgary. After two years of a PhD residency at McGill University in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies, I left academia for a career in the arts sector.

My dissertation was to explore the productive tensions between speech and action, thinking and doing, in intellectual and political life, a theme I had touched on in my Masters Thesis. Rather than study this topic from the sidelines, I realized I wanted to contribute directly to the ecosystems supporting broad-based engagement with ideas.

In 2012, I joined Wordfest, a non-profit arts organization based in Calgary, Canada that connects writers with general audiences through live events and a major, annual readers festival called The Imaginairium. For more than a decade now, I have lead audience engagement, fund development and—more recently—general operations at the organization.

I have experimented with a variety of media and visual art forms over the years. I discovered block print-making as a powerful medium of illustration early on in high school. My interest in Linocut continues to evolve to this day through experimentation with t-shirt designs.

My first foray into 3D computer modelling was for an undergraduate course in media studies where I set out to translate the poetic imagery of T. S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock into a short animation. The film made the highlights reel of the Melbourne International Student Animation Festival.

Throughout my post-secondary days, I accepted gigs designing marketing collateral for a number of academic conferences where I practiced concepts I’d taught myself about visual design.

Sometime in the spring of 2012 after joining Wordfest, I set out to keep a daily “visual” journal in a collection of Moleskine notebooks I had obtained as a birthday gift. I would scan the finished piece each day and post on social media as my “status update” to friends, family, and anonymous followers.

This was before photo-sharing and other rich-media tools gave everyone readymade GIFs and digital stickers to use on our favourite social platforms. If you wanted to break from the monotony of plain text posts in your news feed, or submit something other than a photo of your cat, you had to create your own images.

For me at the time, posting something fun or funny on socials meant cracking open my journal, physically making marks, cutting, pasting, and then dusting off my flatbed scanner.

But I needed supplies. And I was desperate to get started. I went to the nearest dollar store downtown on my way into work one morning. I grabbed a package of cheap markers, a handful of disposable pens, colouring pencils, a plastic stencil for tracing letters, and a set of oversized alphabet stickers in a cartoonish font.

That’s where Dollar Store Doodles first got its name—in that rush to seed a new personal project. Ever since it has been the label I append to almost all my creative output, regardless of content, medium or intended audience.

The project soon evolved from publishing hand drawn sketches and lettering experiments to incorporating collage elements alongside punchy banter. I had inherited my grandparents collection of National Geographic magazines by then, which meant I now had five decades worth of material to incorporate into my daily “doodles.”

What I found striking about the photography in National Geographic is how they can serve as the backdrop for any number of made-up, hammy captions. The magazine is campy without trying, especially the issues from the 1970s. Once I noticed this, I couldn’t un-see it. Ripped from the pages of the otherwise earnest dispatches from far off places, every prized photograph looked like a New Yorker cartoon waiting for a punchline.

My daily practice of adding whimsical alt-captions to National Geographic images lasted for about two years. My creative “interventions” changed the intended meaning and original context of the photos, allowing me to inject my own voice and develop a unique brand of humour. But I never felt I could claim full ownership of the work. Even if the satirical nature of my adaptations were “fair use,” the bulk of the composition—the photo—was someone else’s work product. I worried about how limiting this would be in the long-term, and I stopped developing the series.

By then, from 2013 to 2020, my life partner and I were knee-deep into other forms of world-building. These ranged from a “Small Space Living” condo experiment and camping trips inside the tiniest teardrop trailer imaginable, to erecting a luxury-rustic shipping container cabin that sits overlooking a valley adjacent to the middle of nowhere in Southern Alberta. And then Cooper, a Chihuahua and Tibetan Spaniel mix-breed, entered our lives and stole our hearts.

The focus of my creative pursuits in this period turned to documenting our adventures through videos, animations, and daily doodles. It was all about making memories and then drinking them up visually. But the point was not to take my chronicling efforts too seriously.

When the global COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, my day-job at Wordfest changed overnight. For the next two years, our team embraced online programming and became a broadcaster, beaming twice-weekly livestreams over the internet. Unable to carry out our regular in-person activities during lockdown, and mindful of keeping audiences safe even after public health restrictions were relaxed, we experimented with new show formats that enabled us to advance our mission as a platform for engaging with ideas, books, and authors.

The reinvention of Wordfest at the height of the pandemic opened new avenues for flexing my creative muscles. I became my own “avatar” on screen—a “Digital Concierge” charged with making our audience feel welcome in the virtual space. I developed fresh content for the pre-show reels that kept people entertained while waiting for the 10-minute countdown to finish ahead of the main program. These ranged from quirky animated instructional videos on how to maximize your video-viewing setup, to original trailers and credit openings featuring handmade animations and illustrations.

The intense creative output at my day job during the pandemic years sparked a renewed interest in building up my design and illustration chops. In another lifetime, I would have gone to art school in my formative years. But I’ve since been able to fill in these gaps in formal training through online courses. Domestika.org is my go-to source at the moment for learning new techniques and the foundational principles of design and illustration from leaders in the field. I have enrolled in more than 30 courses.