Emily Chen, BFA’98, remembers drawing frosh T-shirt designs and working part-time doing chalkboard art for Whiskey Willy’s Restaurant in Kingston while studying art in school.
Fast-forward 25 years and she can now proudly put herself among the artists hired by the Royal Canadian Mint to illustrate its coins. She designed the Mint's , sold for $34.95, which features a whimsical design of a bear, a bunny, and a beaver sliding down an icy slide around a tree, while a caribou grazes in the background.
“This lenticular holiday keepsake invites you to join Churchill the polar bear and friends for some thrills, near-spills and endless fun,” the Mint’s website states.
Before you go thinking “lenticular” refers to the Christian Lent, it actually describes a printing process that uses lenses to create the illusion of motion. In this case, the creatures appear to slide down the tree when you tilt the coin.
Chen says the BFA at 鶹’s had a more abstract approach, while she has always leaned toward more illustrative work. After graduating, she found a graphic design gig where she could learn on the job and later spent 20 years freelancing.
“All that time, I was trying to move away from graphic design and into illustration,” she says. “The coin job came up because I’d done some design and illustration work for the Mint over the last few years, and they asked me to submit a design for the lenticular coin.”
She recalls that this all happened in 2024 and that once her design was chosen, she wasn’t allowed to talk about it until the coin was released more than a year later.
“When it was time to talk about it, and I got responses on social media that kind of blew me away, it reminded me that it was a big deal,” she says, adding that it was an honour to be asked and then chosen. “I’ve been overwhelmed by the attention.”
The illustrator, who continues to freelance through while home-schooling her eight- and 14-year-old children, produced the 50-cent coin design in her 50th year and jokes that her goal is to design a loonie when she’s 100.
