Illustration
Drawing Media
For me, drawing is part of my design process. My illustration practice spans traditional media—colour pencil, designers gouache, pen and ink—and digital work in Adobe Fresco and Illustrator. Drawing and design inform each other constantly.
Most work begins the same way it always has: observing something carefully and putting it down on paper. The tools have expanded; the process hasn't changed much since art school.
Analogue Drawing
These pieces were made with colour pencils, designers gouache, ink pens and —in some cases—a combination of all three.
My preference is to work from life or from photographic reference: the discipline of looking carefully at something real keeps the work honest.
The avocado study began as a traditional illustration and was later reconstructed in Adobe Illustrator — a useful exercise in understanding what translation between media gains and loses.
Sushi: Polychromous Pencils
Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils on paper. A study in colour, texture and the particular challenge of making food look exactly like itself.
The complexity of sushi — the glossy rice, the translucent fish, the precise geometry of the roll—makes it genuinely demanding as a subject. That's why it's worth drawing.
InDesign Beginner Lesson Series
Brief: Develop a series of short, visually accessible lessons to introduce InDesign to beginner students with no prior software experience.
The design challenge here was pedagogical as much as visual—how do you present technical information in a way that doesn't intimidate a nervous learner?
The answer involved clear typographic hierarchy, restrained colour, and layouts that model good InDesign practice while teaching it.
I also produced a series of movies to demonstrate skills for students to follow.
Shanghai Gate: Black pen on paper
Drawn on-site in Shanghai. Pen and ink on paper, no underdrawing. The gate's ornamental ironwork demanded patience and a steady hand—the kind of drawing that requires you to stop thinking and just look.
China produced a lot of drawings like this. Years of living somewhere gives you time to pay attention and impacts on your perception and personality.
Fruit SeriesFruit Studies—Ink, Gouache & Colour Pencil
A series of observational studies exploring the same subjects across different media. Ink for structure and line, gouache for flat areas of colour, pencil for texture and subtlety.
Switching between media with the same subject in front of you is one of the fastest ways to understand what each tool actually does.
Rainforest Trail Noosa: Green and black pens
Drawn in the Noosa National Park. The challenge with dense vegetation is selectivity—you can't draw every leaf, so you have to decide what matters and let the rest go. These pieces are as much about editing as they are about the the strokes on the page.
Handy: Adobe Fresco illustration
A digital illustration developed in Adobe Fresco, recognised with a special mention on Behance.
Fresco operates like traditional media in many respects—the brush behaviour, the layering, the way paint mixes—which means the skills transfer more directly than you might expect. This piece was an experiment in how far that translation could go.
The Behance recognition was a useful reminder that work made during study can still stand on its own terms.
