Project brief: Portraits

I was sitting on the toilet in our old house in Melbourne. Directly across from me, hanging on the wall, a portrait of Thibaud (who now lives in that house) stared back at me from behind his aviator sunglasses.

I’d made that portrait on a whim using a photo from a festival we went to together. I’m not good at remembering to get people birthday presents, but sometimes I’m organised enough to have something ready in time. I’d just purchased a Wacom tablet and was using a free sketching program (AutoDesk Sketchbook) to try my hand at digital painting.

Studying the print while on the toilet, I can see a lot of things I’d change if I was making it today. The inconsistent weight of the line-work, for example. However I can also see the fun I had experimenting with it.

“I hope you don’t mind that the photo is in the toilet,” Thibaud said to me once after a few drinks. “It’s not because I don’t like it; it’s because I love it so much, and it means everyone who visits the house is sure to see it!”

I wrote a while ago about custom pet portraits I’ve done over the years. Pets are fun to draw. They can be somewhat forgiving; exaggerated features or colouring can look intentional rather than accidental.

People, however? You can tell straight away if a portrait of someone you know is slightly off. Unless they’re those over-the-top caricatures you purchase in tourist locations, portraits that actually look like the person are HARD.

I moved from the Wacom to the iPad in 2020 and found it a lot easier to draw directly onto a surface. Working on my iPad, I drew a bunch of cartoon-style portraits across multiple commercial projects, friend commissions and personal projects.

Some of my requests have been very funny. One was a friend’s partner who was getting his Australian citizenship. We tried to include as many Australian elements as possible and ended up with him feeding an echidna Vegemite in an ugly rash vest.

Another was a series of weird group illustrations for a netball team, many of whom I know personally or went to school with. One of them I’m related to (can you guess which?!). The first brief was ‘make it weird and sexy’:

The second brief was ‘make us all babies’:

…is one from my dear departed friend Christine, as a gift for her husband Darren. We worked together to craft a story that included the things they love, with multiple people and pet portraits involved.

Christine even liked the portrait of her riding a hot sauce bottle, she ended up using it as a logo for her Mexican restaurant!

So far, I’ve done colleagues on coffee cups, cute babies, old people and more. Portraiture is a skill I’d like to improve on, and I started doing some short studies from photo references by hand to try and improve. Maybe one day I’ll do a portrait that ends up in the Archibald Prize, who knows?

Project brief: Cooking with Family

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September 5, 2025

In the height of Covid, amidst what seemed like endless lockdowns in Australia, my sister Renée was trying to organise a wedding. She was looking with despair at how to wrangle both sides of our family (which are huge), plus Will’s family from the UK, plus friends into a guest list of only 180 people.

Project brief: Portraits & personas

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May 28, 2025

One area where I’m surprised to find a lot of work is creating portraits of teams and illustrations for personas. They’re often little projects with a quick turnaround which is why I thought I’d batch them all together into one post.