Distilled
Distilled.
Three illustration series — Retro Girls, Colourism, and Landscapes — reduced to flat colour, hard shapes, and the space between them. One question runs through all three: how much can you take away before the image stops working?
Scroll ↓Saying more by drawing less.
Three self-initiated series, made as one experiment in visual reduction. Each takes a familiar subject — figures, memory, place — and strips it back to flat colour, hard shapes, and negative space until only the essential idea is left. Distillation, not decoration: less on the surface, more concentrated underneath.
One brief, set to myself: keep removing detail until the picture is about to break — then stop one step earlier. Each series pushes on a different part of that idea.
How little can a scene contain and still feel complete?
Can a single flat image hold a whole story — and stay open to reading?
Can colour and negative space do the work that detail usually does?
The standard I was aiming at.
These experiments started from a long admiration for Malika Favre — the flat colour, the high contrast, and the negative space she trusts the viewer to fill in. Pop Art supplied the bold, graphic palette; Op Art supplied the geometry and the optical play. The goal was never to copy her, but to learn the restraint: to see how few marks a picture actually needs.
Retro Girls
Retro and vintage fashion, redrawn through a modern, minimal lens.
Figures built almost entirely from flat colour and hard-edged positive / negative space — the point where Pop Art and Op Art meet. Vivid palettes carry the mood; the reduction keeps it graphic. Made to hold up equally in digital and in print.
Colourism
Abstract images that each hold a story — and stay open to reading.
A more personal, journalistic thread runs through this one: abstract pieces drawn from lived moments. Simple, vivid colour carries the emotion, and the ambiguity is deliberate — one image, many possible narratives, left for the viewer to finish.
Landscapes
Real places, reduced to a handful of bright colours.
The most direct test of the whole idea: recognisable scenery pared down to essential shapes and a tight, lively palette. A wide range of settings, chosen to show how much natural variety survives even after almost everything has been removed.
Four rules, three subjects.
Art experiments that became a design habit.
These began as pure illustration, but the discipline turned out to be the same one I lean on in interfaces: deciding what to remove. Visual hierarchy, restraint with colour, and trusting negative space to guide the eye behave identically whether the surface is a poster or a product screen.
The habit of asking “what’s the one thing this has to say, and what can go?” is the throughline from this series into the product work I do now.