‘Beauty emerges from basic materials controlled by complicated hands’

My ethos influences all of the ‘swatches’ that I create for every drawing, collage or print. These are essentially hand-drawn testers, crops and patches of pattern made using a variety of different pens at various points of their usage period. People often stop using a pen at the very point it begins to run out and not when it has completely ran out … this leads to a whole pallet of imperfection left undiscovered. The treatment of my tools and how I essentially play with the instinctive techniques of ‘doodling’ across all of the mark-making projects I undertake is very important. As well as being decorative and used as an archive of elements reimagined as texture details within bigger pictures or final outcomes, these swatches provide a reference archive for me in my studio as I map and file every pen with every mark.

Read more about my approach to mark-making as a form of visual communication in my article for the Journal of Illustration:

‘Practice makes imperfect: An introduction to the re-forming of mark-making in contemporary illustration’.