I have a passion for illustration and typography. My influences include graffiti, street art, tattoos, heavy metal album covers and classic 2D animation. I like artwork with strong outlines and a bold style. I especially love crafting original typography where I continue to expand my own unique style.

sawone typography & illustration

This piece draws inspiration from graffiti and tattoo art, featuring hand-drawn typography and illustrations. I started by researching traditional tattoo designs and blackletter fonts and gathered reference images for elements like flowers and hairstyles.

I began with sketches, trying out different ideas until I settled on a final design. Using Photoshop, I combined these sketches to find the right look.

Then, I moved to Illustrator to create the final artwork. I traced over the sketches to make crisp lines and added color and shading. I used halftone dots to give a nod to traditional tattoo shading techniques.

The result is a blend of urban style and digital precision, bringing together classic influences in a modern design.

Puck Prayers: Ice Hockey-Inspired Artwork

Inspired by tattoo flash, this irreverent twist on the traditional 'praying hands' caters to ice hockey fans. Hand-drawn and digitally recreated in Illustrator, the design is optimised for screen printing with a limited colour palette and half-tone shading, perfect for merchandise like apparel and stickers.

I used an AI text-to-image generator to create the initial pose reference images of hockey gloves in the praying hands position, as I wasn’t able to source photography of the equipment in the correct position. These reference images weren’t perfect, sometimes having many more fingers than needed as is common with AI-generated images, however it gave me a good starting point to work with.

I then sketched out my own version of the design, adding extra elements such as the rosary beads, flowing sleeves and light rays.

Finally, I digitised the sketch and added text and colour in Illustrator.

Death Rides a pale horse

This commissioned illustration uses bold outlines and a limited color palette to depict an emotive and desolate scene. The composition is designed to be versatile with separate foreground and background elements and clear space to allow for the addition of extra design elements such as logos where required. Digitally illustrated using Adobe Illustrator.