Illustration
It's about the story
My interest in illustration comes from storytelling. I believe images should tell the 1000 words, stimulate thought and curiosity and may make us question our belief structures. Most importantly, they should enrich our existence.
This page contain galleries of completed illustration work.
I work in a variety of media, with watercolour and conte being my favourites.
Illustration Galleries
Your Family and Stroke
Children's book illustration
Experimental
Save the Dark
Projects
Exhibitions
Your Family and Stroke
A Resource for Children
This is a booklet created to help children and teenagers understand what happens when a parent or loved one has a stroke. This is a collaboration with my daughter Anthea, who wrote the text as a way to help other children understand what is happening during what can be a frightening and traumatizing experience.
This resource is free to download and print.
Children's Book Illustration
A passion since childhood
As a child I loved writing and illustrating my own stories. At 8 1/2, I wrote and illustrated Omar and Me, about me and my favourite black cat. Once my own children had grown, I rekindled this passion and started writing and illustrating stories again. One of these is "Playing Possum", about some early morning escapades in country backyard. Another work in progress is The Spider Who Went to Sea, written by Dave Gittins.
- Omar and Me
- Playing Possum
- The Spider Who Went to Sea
Experimental
A tactile story for children
Playing Possum is a short children’s story I wrote for a friend’s family in 2018. I am currently working on a traditionally illustrated version of the story. The story is based on my friend’s experience in her chook yard in rural Victoria. The story is about a possum that appears to be dead but turns out to be “playing possum”– something possums will do if very frightened or upset by a situation – and the young child who discovers the possum and seeks to help it.
For details on this project and progress photos, see Ashford Wheel magazine 2022/2023
Save the Dark
Large format printing
The aim of this project was to create a large format relief print poster and set of designs based on this, suitable for promoting light pollution awareness.
My design was highly influenced by a trip down the Murray River from Murray Bridge on a paddleboat in November 2021. The texture of the cliffs, and the perspective on the river heavily influenced the vision of my design. The twisted gnarled old roots of a gumtree at Meldanda in the heart of the River Murray International Dark Sky Reserve became the inspiration for the old gum tree in the design.
I featured a wombat as are one of my favourite nocturnal animals and are quite common in the Dark Sky Reserve. Bats and moths are also affected badly by light pollution and are an important part of the ecosystem.
The printed poster was scanned and the design adapted for t-shirts and postcards. I imagined the same wombat and bat, but instead of a beautiful evocative river scene, they were under a massive streetlamp, with the light glaring in their eyes.
This design creates more inference about the need to save the dark. Both incorporate the same bad design lamp post, with its overly bright light streaming light all around. The stars are almost all blotted out- some starts in the Southern Cross are barely visible.
The wombat has its hair brightly lit and the body makes a dark shadow. A ironic addition is the use of dark sunglasses to add inference that the light is simply too bright.
Projects
A Gallery of miscellaneous illustration projects and artworks using
watercolour, coloured pencil, conte and acrylic.
Exhibitions
- Luminous Graduate Exhibition 2022, UniSA Illustration and Animation
- Australian Migrant Resource Centre SA Refugee Week Poster Exhibition 2021
Poster illustration by Alek Zygouris
Sketches
Drawing is the foundation
Drawing is the foundation of my artwork. Sometimes my sketches are very rough, allowing me to experiment with composition before committing to a final layout. Other sketches can be more detailed to develop and refine ideas.
Old stuff!
In my youth I enjoyed messing about in boats.
My background is in photography, with a certificate 4 in Commercial Photography from Elizabeth TAFE 1989.
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