Birling is an Ottawa-based skateboard brand and shop that I co-own. As Birling's Creative Director, I oversee our in-house creative and design our products from concept to creation. I also designed and oversaw construction of the physical shop space. Drop by next time you're in Ottawa!

I travelled to Miami in December, 2024, to participate in the unveiling of the limited edition Ducati Panigale V4 Tricolore at the Viscaya Gardens Museum as part of Art Basel week. I was invited by Outerkind and Ducati North America to capture the unveiling with a live ink and watercolor plein-air illustration. It was a 3 hour event, during which I was capturing the environment and attendants for the first half and then quickly switched angles to capture the bike after its unveiling. Folks got to watch and chat as I painted. I took the piece back to my LA studio to finish up and prep for a limited run of 20 prints. The original piece went to Ducati North America and the prints to the key engineers, designers and creatives responsible for the production of the bike.

SOLD OUT - Out of print

My debut self-publication, is an unfiltered and complete, one-to-one scale reproduction of a sketchbook from a month spent in The West Bank. The focus is on the art and experiences, but it also includes a short and fragmented narrative of how my time there reshaped my perception of world politics and helped me reconnect to my own family’s migration from Soviet Eastern Europe.

In the fall of 2019, I joined a small group of international volunteers in the West Bank to teach skateboarding at an after-school program led by the UK/Palestinian organization SkatePal. Having experienced firsthand how inclusive, empowering, and life-changing skateboarding can be at its best, I wanted to share my experiences both on and off a skateboard with the next generation of Palestinian skaters.

My mornings and weekends were spent wandering through towns and cities, filling my sketchbook with the people, places, and day-to-day of the West Bank. One month and eighty pages later, I left with a sketchbook of memories, moments, and experiences, all drawn and painted from life, and a deep love and respect for Palestine’s culture, people, and history.

Proceeds from the sale of this book have directly supported SkatePal’s ongoing work.

What a treat to work with Ben Giese at VAHNA magazine again.

I was asked to illustrate a 14 page article about the race to land the first backflip on a motorcycle in the early 2000’s. Ben was having a hard time getting his hands on usable photos from this era so he sent me a collection of YouTube videos to research and draw from, in order to be as historically accurate as possible. My love of sketching from life and personal experiences makes research-based illustration and design very enjoyable.

The story is centred around Carey Hart, the first to attempt the backflip, so the coloured spreads all feature him. I started with the 3 coloured pieces of Hart and worked from there to include Travis Pastrana, Caleb Wyatt and T.J. Lavin as line drawings to add some variety to the article and also help keep the cost/time down.

I illustrated these pieces digitally in photoshop, using some ink splatter and texture scans to warm them up and stylize.

Order issue 022 here.

What a treat to have been given the opportunity to be featured in issue 017 of META and design the cover illustration. This issue highlights folks in the bike scene who have built a life around their passions and try, as hard as it may be, to sustain and maintain that. I’m humbled to be feature alongside the talented and skilled folks in this one.

The cover is an illustration of Dylan Gordon’s T140 parked in his studio. Big thanks to Andrew Szeto, Geoff Barrenger, and Ben Geise for words and photos.

Order issue 017 here.

Ottawa, ON (February 21, 2019)— In his latest solo exhibition, “Cold Brew,” Tomas Pajdlhauser showcases 100 watercolour sketches on repurposed paper coffee cups that capture the understated beauty of Ottawa’s cold, overcast winter streets and sidewalks. While most Ottawa residents huddled inside, Tom sketched on location to document the mood of our city as its pace slows under the weight of a polar vortex. The exhibition opens with a vernissage on Sunday, March 3rd at Citizen, a local restaurant owned and run by former Wall Space Gallery manager Lori Wojcik, and will remain on display until April 1st.

Tomas Pajdlhauser (Captain Tom) is best known locally as the creative director and co-owner of Birling, a local skateboard brand and shop. Through his skateboard and clothing graphics for Birling, Tom has built a reputation for design work that highlights little-known details of Ottawa’s history and architecture, from Bytowne to present day. At the same time, Birling itself has become a favourite coffee spot for Centretown locals—the “Cold Brew” sketches on Birling coffee cups encourage Ottawa residents to notice both iconic and overlooked details of our snowy urban landscape as we trudge our way to our own favourite coffee shops. Each cup is a small snapshot of winter in Ottawa, with its muted light, rising exhaust steam, and continuous veil of falling snow.

Each cup is drawn and painted on location using carbon ink and watercolour, varnished for preservation and topped with a stained, baltic birch lid. Interested in the tactile and physical process of design work, Tom’s personal and commercial projects frequently highlight a love of travel and adventure and develop from lived experiences captured on-the-go in sketchbooks. The “Cold Brew” coffee cup series involved many hours of outdoor sketching on Ottawa’s cold winter streets.

Click here to see all the cups.

Working with Biltwell has been a blast! These are like-minded folks who respect designers and are doing interesting things with their brand. What started as a t-shirt design of a CB 650 Cafe Racer, turned into a larger scale project for which I was asked to illustrate the section pages and cover of their 2018 catalogue. I created and delivered six original ink and watercolour pieces. Each illustration focused on a different aspect of a bike, which tied into the theme of each catalogue section.

The fine folks from The Moto Social invited me to come out and participate in their 2019 Moto Social Camp fundraiser for Jack.org. I was asked to spend the event day wandering around the Picton airfield, sketching whatever caught my eye. We turned the sketches into prints and sold them to raise money for mental health awareness and programming through Jack.org. It was a fun experiment and great learning experience for all of us. In retrospect, with the amount of folks at the event who were asking me to sketch portraits of their bikes, it might have been a more lucrative fundraiser to do just that. Maybe next time.

In March 2018, I was invited to participate as an artist in the annual Outlier's Guild Custom Motorcycle Show in Downtown LA and again in 2019 to create the key art and branding for the show. The first year I exhibited a large original ink & watercolour piece of the Royal Enfield Bullet 500 which I rode across India, accompanied by a few prints of images from my travel sketchbook. Royal Enfield snagged the set for their USA office. The following year I was invited to create the key art and promotional material for the show which included an original mural, painted on-site during the show. The challenge was to create an image in my loose style that could be translated from tonal poster art to a single colour vector graphic that could be printed and embroidered onto a variety of promotional products and be incorporated into a painted mural to tie it all together. I exhibited a large original ink & watercolour piece featuring the Honda Africa Twin that I rode through the Colorado Rockies and into Utah the previous summer. The piece included a set of complementing images printed from my travel sketchbook of that trip. Can’t wait to do it all again!

Detroit is a reminder of how the greed of a few can affect the lives of many. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Detroit is a shadow of its former industrious self. The neglect and decay of Detroit’s urban infrastructure has attracted many artists and skaters who use what’s been forgotten by capital in fun and creative ways. Detroit’s vibrantly diverse communities have repurposed abandoned properties into public space, making Detroit a city where skateboarding has made its way back into urban centres after decades of suburban exile. In July 2019, a few of us came out to skate, shoot and sketch. I put together a small print run of books from this trip with Birling.

Fast Times Magazine featured some of my artwork, along with an interview, in their Summer 2017 issue. To keep it fresh, I created brand new artwork for the feature based on my favourite motorcycle adventures to date. I was also lucky enough to have all the right questions asked by my best friend and artist, Drew Mosley. Take a peek (and have a read if you have laser vision).

I had the pleasure of working with my talented friend Andrew Szeto and Maru the Circle Brand on this "moto camper" hat and print set. I was fortunate enough to be given a blank slate as to the content that could be featured on the camper hat and decided to feature a scene illustrating my favourite part of moto camping—the fire. The two illustrations are printed on the side panels of the hat, complimented by a stylized embroidery of the Maru logo. Since the images on the hat are reduced in size and use only a limited colour range, it made sense to create a limited run of signed, numbered, and dated prints to show off the scene's details (my KLR 650 and wet socks cooking by a fire).