The book of Tyler

Growing up, doodling dinosaurs, Tyler Landry never imagined his art would one day inspire a book.
Now, almost 100 of the Summerside native's images are featured in an independently published book, "The Book of Clav".
"It's amazing, awesome," Landry said. "I do my 9 to 5 job every day. I'm lucky enough to be able to use all these skills for the job. This stuff is just a creative exercise. It feels good. It's soul work."
Landry has been drawing since he could hold a pencil.
His parents still have his very first piece.
"It's a happy face with little legs heading down a path. It was in perspective and I was two and I'm not even sure how it happened," he said with a laugh.
"It just feels good to make pictures."
As he got older, Landry's interest in art grew.
"I used to fill scribblers with pictures of dinosaurs. For a long time all I drew was dinosaurs," he added. "Then, whatever excited me, I was drawing."
He took classes, was an artist's assistant in high school and graduated from Holland College's visual communications program.
In 2003, through an online art community, Landry met Scott Lambridis and Dave Senecal of California-based independent publishers, Omnibucket.
"Out of the millions of artists there, his work immediately grabbed my attention," said Senecal.
Landry, who they knew as 'Clav' - his online moniker - submitted images for Omnibucket's second release, "Eleventy Billion Miles Away", which led to Senecal and Lambridis asking Landry to collaborate on another book.
He submitted a few hundred drawings and "The Book of Clav" was born.
"Since it would have been impossible to write a story to which the illustrations would match perfectly, it felt natural to take a step back and do something that allowed the art and the writing to inform each other without them being explicitly tied," said Lambridis. "The idea of someone finding this art randomly and exploring it on his own, without knowing the origin, felt natural."
Written as journal entries by a fictional artist, the book incorporates Landry's images.
"There's nothing literal between the content of any of these images and what's going on with the main character who is writing the entries," he explained. "They illustrate this dark space in a person's life, which was exactly what was going on in my life when I put these things together."
The images are a far cry from his art of late, mostly influenced by son D'anyil.
"It's funny because I've kind of gotten back into dinosaurs over the last couple of months," said Landry.

Biography
• Parents Danny and Sharon Landry of Summerside
• Graduated in 2001 from Holland College's visual communications course
• Worked as art director and staff illustrator for Wine Magazine, an online magazine in Nova Scotia
• Currently art director at Bight Interactive Inc. in Charlottetown
• For more information on "The Book of Clav" visit http://thebookofclav.omnibucket.com
• Limited number of books available for purchase at Omnibucket's website
• Landry uses various artistic media, from ink, pencils and paint to Photoshop. "I go through phases where I favour one or another. I generally use them all, sometimes combinations of all of them at once."
• On seeing his ideas come to life: "It'll be the lines or the way the forms are done or the style of the drawing or maybe the way that the colours play with each other that really kind of gets me excited."