Unveiling the Art of Ink
A Journey Through My Artistic Vision
My ink work blends realism with expressive mark-making, creating illustrations that are both detailed and deeply personal. Using dip pens and fineliners, I craft scenes through intricate hatches, squiggles, and layered linework, resulting in images that invite close inspection and reward slow looking.
Often grounded in architectural and natural themes, my illustrations also explore metaphor and mood, particularly through interpretive pieces that respond to poetry and prose. One of my passions is working with authors to bring key scenes, characters, and settings to life, translating narrative into visual form with care and creativity.
I was first drawn to ink for its bold simplicity and expressive potential. Some of my earliest serious works were black-and-white ink drawings on sketchbook covers, and I’ve been captivated ever since by how much can be said without using colour. My illustrations are now set to appear in upcoming novels and poetry anthologies.
Above all, I hope viewers feel a sense of wonder in the textures, layers, and marks—much like I did as a child studying the ink illustrations of Chris Riddell, where each line felt like a world of its own.
Pricing- what to expect
My ink illustrations can be a wide range of subjects and sizes and thus the price fluctuates, a typical price to expect is £50 for full pages and £30 for half pages but more detailed commissions may be higher. These prices and any quote you are given include commercial licensing to use the art within your book and on social media with proper credit. Feel free to reach out to me to discuss what you have in mind and recieve a full quote.
Explore My Ink Illustrations
Here you’ll find my completed ink illustrations: pieces drawn from architecture, nature, story, and imagination. Each one is shaped through delicate linework and intuitive mark-making, inviting a slower, closer kind of observation.
Though in black and white, these works are rich in tone and atmosphere. Whether created for personal exploration or in collaboration with authors and clients, they all share the same aim: to offer a quiet moment of depth, detail, and visual storytelling.
Poetry and Illustration
Some words ask to be seen as much as read. This section displays artwork created to conexist with poems: Answering thier questions with ink: interpreting verses through lines, patterns, and forms that mirror the poem’s feeling as much as its imagery. Each illustration is a conversation between language and mark-making, where metaphor becomes visual, and tone becomes texture. I don’t aim to explain the poems, but to accompany them, offering an additional layer, a way to linger in the space between the lines. These pieces are as much about listening as they are about drawing, adding double meanings and alternate interpretations. Below you can see several alongside my thought process in creating them. All of my artwork is incredibly measured and intentional but my poetry illustration are perhaps the best examples of this.
I will now go through several poems and explain my response to them, showing my thought process and choices in the illustration. These were based on my inital reading of the poems that i sent to the poet who suggested ay additions that were important to the context of the poetry and the book due to the personal nature of them.
Locked Inside
This poem explores the fear of confinement: physically within an institution, and mentally within the self. It reflects how mental illness can feel like both a literal and internal prison.
At first glance, this delicate illustration of a picturesque cottage appears calm and inviting. But upon closer examination, every window is barred and the door is barricaded. This tension between beauty and captivity reflects the poem’s exploration of mental illness and masking. Inspired by the line likening patients to inmates, I intentionally designed the cottage to appear charming from the outside yet prison-like within, symbolising how someone can seem fine but feel utterly trapped inside their own mind. Outer looks are deceiving: the reality of living inside is not reflected outside representing how mental illness can be incredibly internal and incredibly masked. Encapsulating these themes with my delicate ink work as a great experiance, balancing the beauty of my usual illustrations with a more sinister detail with the layered meaning.
Porcelain
This poem uses the metaphor of dolls to examine the long-lasting effects of gender roles and the way we are raised leading into manipulation and abuse, touching on coercion, control, and forced performance.
This piece takes the poems metaphorical approach to dolls and manipulation and transforms it into a literal illustration. The central figure: a doll-like girl in a lolita dress is held by strings, manipulated by unseen hands emerging from the shadows. Her smile is a plastered-on mask concealing but not entirely, a tear-streaked face, highlighting the emotional dissonance between what we show and what we feel espesially when hiding abuse due to the illusion of love and it "getting better". The aesthetic nods to the way the figure in the poem assumes the role of her childhood dolls of permanently wearing a smile and being dressed up and played with while confronting its darker connotations of control, silence, and loss of agency.
Tell Me Where To Pick You Up
Spoken from the perspective of a friend trying to prevent suicide, this poem is a quiet promise of unconditional support and presence no questions, just love.
A more grounded, literal image, this piece captures the emotional core of the poem: unwavering presence in moments of darkness. The rain and deep shadows reflect a heavy emotional state, while the car's bright headlights cut through the gloom. The composition draws the viewer toward that light, toward hope, mirroring how, even in despair, there’s someone willing to come find you.
No Rain, No Flowers
This poem reflects on recovery from an eating disorder—life after hospitalisation, and the complex beauty of healing that comes with both darkness and light
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Heavily Inspired by real imagery from the poet's life, this illustration shows a woman and her dog in a familiar field. Rain falls over blooming flowers, while a warm sun rises behind. The scene embodies the poem’s message: recovery is a blend of pain and growth. The contrast between the rain and sunlight highlights the bittersweet truth that both are necessary for healing, that healing is not always linear and will inevitably contain good and bad: rain and flowers but such is life- the life the speaker is reintergating into following a long stint in hospital. This illustration is a great example of my use of texture and mark making to build up an impression of a location ad the natrual world such a the grass whitch is actually just a series of overlapping lines or the distant flowers whitch are actually small repeating circles.
Alone Together
In just a few lines, this poem captures the emotional aftermath of a fight between parent and child two people suffering alone on either side of the same door- unified by pain, seperated by anger.
A single teardrop encloses a parent and child, both weeping after an argument. Each is isolated in their own storm, yet their appearance mirrors each other hinting at the cycle of generational trauma. Rain falls on both figures, reflecting the poem’s message that adults and children alike carry inner battles, and sometimes pass them down without meaning to. The illustration takes a ying yang aproach in colours with the mothers rain black on white and her white on black and the child's rain white on black and her black on white showcasing how the mother is burdend and changed by her trauma and how that is what is raining on her child wheras her rain matches hr child and represents her guilt for inflicting this. This illustration is a great showcase of how, despite only inking in black, i can use my colours of black ink and white paper to convey meaning.
A Peak Into My Sketchbook
Where It All Began
Before I began illustrating professionally, my sketchbook was my constant companion, a visual diary capturing the places, moments, and atmospheres that moved me. These drawings are fragments of inspiration captured primarily during time spent in Stratford-upon-Avon Flamborough and Marmaris. Historical remnants of another time, quiet windows, looming trees, and cascading waterfalls, all caught in passing, then immortalised in pen.
This sketchbook is a kind of visual journal, a map of inspiration before the path became clear. It reveals the beginnings of how I see: detail-first, drawn to texture and form, noticing the overlooked. These pages hold the spark of what would later become my practice: not just a study of bricks and mortar, but of the spirit of place: the stories that unfold across each surface, whispered into every crack and corner. My creative practice has always centered storytelling.
A Closer look
All of my ink work is intricate and based in my lifelong love of detail and desire to capture that detail. Each piece comprises of hundrends of pen marks. I make these pen marks intutivly, using a combination of dots, dashes, lines, circles and squiggles to make up the full impression. Take a look at these closer sections to look at the details that make the pieces.
Like my work?
If you like my work, get in touch!
Tell me about your book and how my ink pen can help bring it to life!