With curiosity and a bit of resilience you eventually discover your own visual territory

Somewhere in the quiet hours of making art the mind slips sideways and time loosens its grip, and that is usually where I find myself when I am drawing patterns like this coconut crab wallpaper, slowly arranging claws and shells into repeating shapes until the whole thing begins to feel less like decoration and more like a language that arrived from another world, a strange visual grammar where…

With curiosity and a bit of resilience you eventually discover your own visual territory

The southern elephant seal is one of those animals most people will travel their entire lives without ever meeting, let alone sharing a quiet morning coffee with, which is partly why it ended up in my Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet series in the first place. The series has always shown the animals straight on, like a passport photograph or, if we are being honest, a hunters trophy on the wall, and with the dear southern elephant seal that approach produced something that sits somewhere between a blob fish and the unfortunate silhouette of a poo emoji, but once a path is chosen sometimes you simply keep walking it and let people decide for themselves.

There is a quiet satisfaction in taking these strange little animal portraits and letting them step off the page into something physical that people actually live with. A mug is a small thing in the world, but it sits in your hands every morning, and it carries with it both design and a gentle nudge toward the existence of a creature most people will never see in the wild.

Art Dude

A few quiet superstitions can actually serve an artist

Superstitions often shape behaviour in ways that protect the work. One of the most useful is the belief that ideas lose power when they are talked about too early. When an artist treats a new idea like something fragile that must be protected, it tends to get finished before it is diluted by outside opinion. The superstition is that the idea will disappear if you expose it too soon, and whether…

A few quiet superstitions can actually serve an artist

The Healing Power of Art: Synesthesia, Dreams & NFTs with James Lee | Fork in the Road Podcast

A proper old school art supply place

Dreams can be hard to catch, especially when you are trying to do it every day like I have. Sometimes an epic movie plot unspools and leaves a mountain of tangled celluloid on the floor. This image, Twin Moons, was more like a cryptic postcard from the other side. No writing, just a stamp and somehow addressed to me.

Even if I did have an explanation of who it was from or what it meant, I would…

A proper old school art supply place

What can artists learn from the Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet to help them become thriving artists?

A stubborn refusal to accept the expected hierarchy of the wild

The last thing I learned came from an animal most people barely think about, yet it carries the kind of stubborn intelligence that artists quietly admire. The honey badger lives in a world that tries to bite, poison, sting, and overpower it every day, and instead of shrinking it simply keeps moving through the chaos with a strange mixture of curiosity, toughness, and indifference to fear.

Buy…

A stubborn refusal to accept the expected hierarchy of the wild

From Political Cartoons to Abstract Art | Lissy Elliott on Breaking Into Painting & Selling Art

My Visual Dream Journal

Some of my latest dreams captured with words and recreated with AI. I’ve finally come up with something that resembles those fleeting glimpses into the infinite creative engine of the dream world, blending it with the limitless possibilities of AI. It feels fitting to merge these two worlds that seem to coexist in the ether. Minting…

My Visual Dream Journal

Growing a Generation That Cares Enough to Protect What Remains

When I make sunflower art it was never going to be proper garden sunflowers turning obediently toward the light. The version that found its way onto my drawing table was the sunflower sea star, a creature famous not just for its sheer size but for the surprising speed it can move across the ocean floor, a many armed giant that shifts with an urgency most people never expect from a sea star, which…

Growing a Generation That Cares Enough to Protect What Remains

Independent & Unstoppable: Jason Sweeney’s 35-Year Music Career

Aardvark Wallpaper Greeting Cards That Double as Mini Wall Art

Buy Aardvark Wallpaper Cards

Aardvarks are one of those animals everyone thinks they know, mostly because half the businesses in the old phone books called themselves Aardvark something just to cheat their way to the front of the directory. Now the directories are gone and the poor thing only really shows up if your finger slips over the letter A while searching, which seems a strange fate for…

Aardvark Wallpaper Greeting Cards That Double as Mini Wall Art

Some endings are less about loss and more about transformation

The Hypno Bat Sunflower Star crawled out of that strange territory where repetition stops being design and starts feeling slightly unhinged, like staring too long at wallpaper and realising it might be staring back. It began as fully hand drawn physical work, built from my original Hypno Bat line work in pen on paper before being finished digitally in Procreate, where I could stretch the…

Some endings are less about loss and more about transformation

My Visual Dream Journal - Day 144

– New Guy –

In my Visual Dream Journal, I frantically snatch at the fleeting scraps of my dreams with the help of AI, preserving the absurd, dark, and beautiful bits before they dissolve into the ether forever. The project is an uneasy handshake between my twisted subconscious and the bizarre digital fragments that drift through the AI mist, forming a living archive of imagination and…

My Visual Dream Journal - Day 144

I’d be the worst person in the world

I have never liked thought experiments. So let us run the worst thought experiment imaginable. If I could be someone else for a day, I would choose the worst person in the world. Not because it would be enjoyable. It would probably be the most confronting day a human mind could experience. I would want to wake inside one of the people positioned at the centre of immense power, where decisions…

I’d be the worst person in the world

Honoring My Five-Year-Old Self: The Artist-Zookeeper of Uncommon Animals

Read blog or purchase my - S is for Salamander original 1/1 Print

Honoring My Five-Year-Old Self: The Artist-Zookeeper of Uncommon Animals

We search the skies for wonder while stepping over it in the grass.

My alien animals began the way most honest creative work begins, quietly, without a grand plan. Just curiosity poking at the edges of an idea. Around that time the world seemed briefly obsessed with things in the sky. UAP they called them now, which still feels like a rebrand of the old UFO conversations many of us grew up with. Grainy footage, official statements, endless speculation. The…

We search the skies for wonder while stepping over it in the grass.

Integrating work, family and art in a way that is sustainable.

My Hypno Bats are probably still out there somewhere, suspended in the digital ether. Hundreds of them. Different colours, slight variations, small evolutions of the same strange creature. I minted them across multiple NFT platforms during the boom, when it felt like artists were being handed a new set of keys. Upload the work. Tokenise it. Own the rails. Bypass the gatekeepers.

Hypno Bat Purple…

Integrating work, family and art in a way that is sustainable.

Make a body of work that feels undeniably yours

If I could sit down with my teenage self, the kid who loved animals but was already learning to dilute himself to fit in, I would not tell him to be realistic. I would tell him to be precise about what he is refusing.

Do not give up on art. Not because it is safe. It is not. Not because it is glamorous. It rarely is. Do not give it up because it is the one thread that runs clean through your…

Make a body of work that feels undeniably yours

The Yangtze finless porpoise lives in one of the busiest rivers on Earth

Cargo ships grind overhead. Industry churns the water into a permanent murk. It is nearly blind, so it listens instead. It sends out sound and reads the returning echo, building a picture of the world from vibration rather than spectacle…

and speaking of spectacle…

What bores you?

Rows of people facing the same direction, wearing the same colours, chanting the same lines. Week after week,…

The Yangtze finless porpoise lives in one of the busiest rivers on Earth

Most artists underestimate how much water they need

Especially those trying to cross that fragile invisible threshold between surviving and thriving. The brain is mostly water, and every idea begins as an electrical event moving through that internal ocean. When the water level drops, the signal weakens. Thoughts fragment. The deeper images become harder to reach. You stay on the shoreline of yourself, sensing something vast just out of…

Most artists underestimate how much water they need

How artists cross the invisible line between being overlooked and being undeniable

The aardvark is not a celebrity species. It does not make headlines. It lives in the margins, working the night shift, shaping ecosystems while the world sleeps. Most people could live their entire lives without ever thinking about one. Turning it into wallpaper felt like correcting an imbalance. Not through force, but through repetition. The same creature appearing again and again until it…

How artists cross the invisible line between being overlooked and being undeniable

The Hypno bat has stayed with me from the beginning, like those old sneakers

The Hypno bat has never felt like a single finished artwork to me. It behaves more like a living organism that keeps shedding its skin and growing a new one. This latest version carries the fingerprints of another visual language that has been emerging through my Visual Dream Journal series, which is my direct collaboration with AI. In that space, I bring the instinct, the symbolism, and the…

The Hypno bat has stayed with me from the beginning, like those old sneakers

S is for Sunflower Sea Star - Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet

The sunflower sea star is one of the largest sea stars on Earth, capable of growing up to a metre across, moving with eerie speed along the ocean floor on thousands of tiny tube feet. It is not a passive ornament. It is a hunter. It keeps sea urchin populations in balance, which in turn protects kelp forests. And kelp forests are underwater cities. They are nurseries, shelter, oxygen factories,…

S is for Sunflower Sea Star - Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet

Visual Dream Journal — Day 137: Take Cover

You know how during a solar eclipse you can make a pinhole camera inside a cardboard box so you can safely witness something too bright and overwhelming to look at directly. This felt like that. Only instead of an eclipse it was an intense meteor storm ripping through the atmosphere. Fire in the sky. Chaos above. And we stood below with cardboard boxes over our heads, each with a small viewing…

Visual Dream Journal — Day 137: Take Cover

A “hidden wonder,” quietly going about their work while the world fixates on myths.

Ever known a blood-sucking corporate executive? Or maybe one of those energy vampires who leaves you drained by the time they walk out the door? Well, I’ve got a gift idea that’s subtle, pointed… and entirely stylish: vampire bat wallpaper socks.

– Buy Vampire Bat Socks –

Before you dash for the checkout, though, let’s clear something up. The vampire bat isn’t just a cheeky metaphor for your…

A “hidden wonder,” quietly going about their work while the world fixates on myths.

Who Are the Art Police?

My Vampire Bat began the old fashioned way. Pen scratching across paper. Ink staining fingers. I used three reference photographs, fed them into AI to generate a symmetrical guide because bats, like leaves and lungs, carry that mirror language of nature. Then I drew it by hand in pencil before inking it. Photographed the drawing. Painted it digitally in Procreate. Then I copied and pasted that…

Who Are the Art Police?

Is it too scary for my Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet kids book?

My Vampire Bat did not feel evil as I drew it. It felt precise. Ancient. Efficient. A survivor doing what it has always done, long before humans arrived with their stories and fears and misunderstandings. We have turned Vampire bats into villains, but the reality is far less dramatic. They do not kill. They take only what they need. They exist within balance. In many ways they are more honest…

Is it too scary for my Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet kids book?

I would happily create until I am cold in the soil

The Hypno Bat Electric Eel pillows are finally out in the world. A soft square thing that carries a bit of voltage in it. Camouflaged and blending into electrical eel currents, symmetry pulling against itself, light and dark circling each other like they are negotiating a truce. It looks calm, but it is not. There is a proper yin and yang tension stitched into it. Air and water. Predator and…

I would happily create until I am cold in the soil