Why I don't have a signature style (and why that's deliberate)

Browse enough illustration portfolios and you'll notice a pattern. Most illustrators have a look, a recognisable visual fingerprint that follows them from project to project. You know their work the moment you see it. It's a legitimate and brilliant strategy, and I genuinely admire illustrators who've built a strong, consistent voice and made it theirs.

I just don't work that way.

My portfolio looks, at first glance, like it might belong to several different people. A deck of playing cards rooted in Port Arthur's convict history sits alongside a gentle underwater counting book for toddlers. Brand illustrations for a luxury hotel live next to a scientifically accurate picture book about a critically endangered handfish. Historical narrative work done under a creative director shares space with live illustration performed in theatres across China, Japan and the USA.

Same hand. Very different worlds.

This wasn't an accident

I trained as an illustrator, then branched into graphic design, and that second training shaped how I approach every brief. Design is inherently audience-first. You're solving a visual problem for a specific person in a specific context. That thinking never left me.

When I take on a new project, the first question I ask isn't what do I want to make? It's what does this project actually need?

That means a discovery session with the client to understand their vision, their audience, their brand, and importantly, what their competitors are doing and what they're not doing. It means looking at references not just for inspiration but for gaps: where is the visual space no one has occupied yet? It means researching the subject deeply enough to have an informed point of view before a single sketch is made. And it usually means developing at least two distinct visual directions to present, so the conversation with the client is genuinely exploratory.

The Port Arthur deck of cards is a good example. Historical illustration commissions almost always pull toward the expected: etched lines, muted palettes, academic realism. That's the visual shorthand for "this is serious and old." But I wanted something that could hold a child's attention and an adult's without talking down to either. I had real artistic freedom on that project and I used it. The result was something I don't think had been seen in that context in Tasmania before.

Macq01 was a different kind of challenge. A creative director had already defined the visual language and my job was to bring ideas to life within it. The style was more traditional, closer to what you'd expect from historical illustration, but the storytelling lived in the details and the quirkiness of the illustration mashup within the image. Working within constraints is its own skill, and I find it just as interesting as starting from a blank brief.

What stays the same

Even when the style shifts completely, something consistent runs through all of it.

The quality of observation. A warmth in the atmosphere. Attention to the world-building details that make a scene feel inhabited rather than staged. And always, the relationship between image and story, the sense that the picture is doing real narrative work, not just decorating the page.

With Hold On: Saving the Spotted Handfish, the author needed the fish to be scientifically accurate. That's a real constraint when your audience is children who need to find the book charming, not clinical. So the challenge became: how do you make rigorous accuracy feel warm? That's a genuinely interesting problem, and solving it required a completely different visual approach than One Remarkable Reef, where I had much more freedom and drew something soft and dreamy for a younger audience reading before sleep.

The live illustration work with Terrapin Puppet Theatre taught me something else about this. Touring You and Me and the Space Between through China, Japan and the USA, I was drawing live in real time, in cue with the music, the narrator, the puppeteer moving the stage. The tool we used had its own constraints: thick outlines, flat colour. The style emerged from those conditions rather than from a predetermined aesthetic.

Making work for no one in particular

Not everything I make starts with a brief. Captain Blueberry began as a personal project, a story I wanted to tell without a client, a deadline or an audience brief shaping the decisions. And I still carve out time for personal work, watercolour and ink explorations that don't belong to any project or anyone.

This is where the question flips. Instead of asking what does this project need, I get to ask what do I want to say. Or sometimes I don't ask anything at all and just let things emerge from a less conscious place. It's a different kind of making, and I think it's necessary. It fills a creative need that commissioned work, however interesting, can't always reach.

It also quietly feeds back into everything else. The freedom of personal work loosens something. Ideas surface there that find their way into briefs later, in ways I couldn't have planned.

On the pressure to "find your style"

I want to be clear: finding a signature style and committing to it is a completely valid and often smart career move. Most illustrators do it, many thrive because of it. The recognisability builds a reputation, attracts an agent, creates a steady client base that knows exactly what they're getting. I respect that path deeply.

My path just started differently. Working in Tasmania's small creative market early in my career, I quickly realised that if every client got the same visual language, the work would blur together. I needed range. That need, combined with my design training, pushed me toward developing distinct approaches rather than a single one.

If you're a younger illustrator feeling the pressure to lock something in: experiment freely, and follow what feels alive and brings you joy. A signature voice often arrives on its own if you give it room. But if you find yourself genuinely drawn to different worlds and different ways of making, that's not always a lack of direction. It's a different kind of skill. Just make sure your portfolio makes it legible, not a confusing pile of everything, but a clear signal of what you can do and when.

I was always told to find a voice and stick to it. I did the opposite. I approached illustration the way a graphic designer would, working for the brief and the audience rather than for a look. It's served me well. I get to experiment, explore, work across a large array of industries and learn about them and the world in the process. It's opened more doors than it's closed.

And I'll never get bored.