My Design Process

Every piece starts with a feeling. Not a plan, not a brief. Just something I want to get down before it goes away.

Looking first

Before I draw anything, I stare at the thing for a while. A building, a face, a crack in the pavement. I'm looking for shapes and rhythm, trying to figure out what makes it interesting to me specifically. This part takes longer than people expect.

Tiny thumbnails

I do a bunch of small thumbnails, maybe 3cm wide. They're ugly. That's fine. I'm figuring out where the eye should go and whether the composition holds together. Most of the real decisions happen here, not during the final sketch.

The actual drawing

This is where it gets physical. I work mostly in graphite and ink on paper. Ink especially, because there's no undo. Every line has to earn its place, which keeps me honest.

Things I care about while drawing:

• Line weight. Thick in the foreground, thin in the background. Simple rule, big difference.
• What I leave out. Empty space does a lot of work if you let it.
• Energy over precision. A slightly crooked line with feeling behind it beats a perfect one that's dead on the page.

Cleaning up (sometimes)

Some sketches are done after one pass. Others I'll scan and adjust the contrast or clean up edges digitally. But I try not to smooth out the hand-drawn character. That's what makes it mine.

The blue thing

Phthalo Blue and Prussian Blue show up in almost everything I make. There's a depth to those blues that I can't get enough of. Dark enough to ground a composition, bright enough to pull you in.

I picked them as the accent colours for this site for the same reason I reach for them on paper. They just feel right.