Welcome to my website! This is where I collect all of my personal work-- I do a lot of different types of things, so please explore the sections that most interest you via the navigation up above!

ABOUT ME
I’m a Toronto-based comic artist, illustrator, podcaster, and designer in the animation industry. With a background in fine art and illustration, I’ve created bodies of work in multiple fields; in particular graphic novels, landscape and figure painting, and animation.

COMICS

I've been making comics since 2005. It all began when I started illustrating a story called 'Sevensmith' for a friend and became addicted to the medium. Shortly thereafter I started work on my own story, Chirault, which I wrote and illustrated myself. Chirault was completed in 2018.

My current webcomic, Wychwood, launched in 2019 and is available via its own website as well as on Webtoon Canvas. Its first printed volume debuted in May 2024, via Kickstarter. It was nominated for the Best Webcomic award at Sequential Magazine in 2021, and for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Aurora Award for Best Graphic Novel in 2023 and 2024.

I have illustrated short stories for five TO Comix Press anthologies (Volume 2, Volume 3, Yonge at Heart, Osgoode as Gold, and The City We Chose), two of which were nominated for the Joe Schuster award. I also wrote and illustrated short stories for five anthologies released by the SpiderForest Webcomic Collective (Threads, Gallery of Rogues, Haunted, Secret Places, and Creatures). The Comics tab has a more thorough listing of my work.

LANDSCAPE PAINTING
Beginning in summer 2011, I started making acrylic paintings of the scenery in and around Big Bald Lake, in the Kawarthas (Ontario, Canada), as seen from a kayak or from sitting on the rocks. I paint with acrylic paints on stretched canvas or wood board, and on location (sometimes in a hurry if it starts to rain). I have also created a series of paper greeting cards of a series of watercolour landscape studies around a similar theme.

PODCAST
The Screen Tones webcomic podcast was founded by me and several other webcomic-creator friends in 2021. On the show, we talk about all subjects that pertain to webcomics, from the writing and inception, to the craft and minutiae of the drawing and production, to marketing and exploration of print and crowdfunding. You can check out our work at the Screen Tones official website.

ANIMATION
In 2012 I started working as a texture artist in computer animated television. Since then I've worked on many different productions for clients such as Disney, Mattel, Nickelodeon, BBC Kids, and SpinMaster, with a number of different rendering engines and software approaches. I pivoted to Design for animated productions in 2021, and contributed background painting to Disney's Cursed Cafe game for the Nintendo Switch in 2025.

I have a Bachelor in Fine Art from NSCAD University in Halifax in 2010, and a Certificate in Computer Animation from Sheridan College in 2012. My email is varethane@gmail.com, and I can be found on a variety of other websites under the username 'varethane'.