The story behind my new Playfield abstracts

A few months ago I decided to have a year of sitting still. I decided to say no to lots of things, not respond to every brief and just get off the illustrators' treadmill for a bit.

By doing that it created much needed space to just experiment and play and I turned that play into creating some new collage work.

They started as a simple tessellation idea, confined within a square frame in a very limited colour palette. I enjoyed shifting the shapes around like one of those sliding tile puzzles that used to drive me crazy as a child. But after a while they began to feel too boxed in. What I found while playing, is that their progression really resonated with how I'd been feeling lately - they needed space. So I started loosening them, giving them space to breathe, adding different shapes with curved edges instead of just rigid lines, slowly a bit more colour and texture and I started to see what they might become.

You can find my first collection in the shop here