An ongoing, minimal illustration and animation series that develops a simple, repeatable visual system to explore emotional states, personal narratives, and long-term artistic evolution.
Context
This began almost by accident.
Once I wanted to let out my feelings, putting my anger, sadness, and affection onto paper, without expressing them to anybody, without having to hurt anybody.
Then a bird came naturally, representing me. I’ve always felt like a wandering bird – moving from one place to another, always searching for the next place to land.
I started to use it, along with other birds and specific colours, to capture everyday emotional shifts: collisions, tensions, small after-effects of relationships and interactions.
Red and blue felt immediate: red as intensity, heat, and disruption; blue as calm, distance, and quiet melancholy.
Gradually, this became something I kept returning to, and is now the central visual system through which I explore my inner world and artistic practice.
What I Do
– I develop a minimal, repeatable visual language – I draw regularly, letting the series evolve over time – I allow forms, colours, and meanings to shift rather than stay fixed – I treat the series as both expression and structure
Current Output
– An ongoing series of drawings (started October 2025, with new works every few days) – A growing body of small, evolving images – Early visual systems and recurring motifs – Extensions into digital forms (Procreate, Blender models, R-based visual experiments)
Evolution
The series has changed significantly over time:
– From coloured pencils and watercolour → to primarily digital (Procreate) – From detailed rendering → to increasingly abstract forms – From relational scenes (red bird & blue bird) → to a more introspective, single-subject focus – From bright, saturated reds → to deeper, darker tones, reflecting a shift in emotional depth
Earlier Drawings
More Recent Works
The Red Bird – States & Situations
A recurring red bird moves through routes, borders, pressure, fatigue, repair and small attempts at escape.
Repetition keeps the character recognizable while setting, gesture and colour allow its bodily and emotional state to shift.
Out for Some Sun
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
A red bird reaches beyond a dark boundary toward an open sky, turning a simple gesture into a small image of movement, relief and wanting space.
Selected for Colours of Healing Group Exhibition, Loud Art Society, Calgary, 2026.
Self Repair
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Game equipment and mechanical repair turn emotional injury into a scene of self-maintenance and upgrading.
Selected for Colours of Healing Group Exhibition, Loud Art Society, Calgary, 2026.
Young People and Narrowed Pathways
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
The contradiction between specialization and versatility is compressed into a narrowing road, making a personal career anxiety visible through a simple spatial metaphor.
Pause the Rush
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Intersecting routes and repeated states of the red bird turn travel and commuting into spatial fragmentation.
Head Down, Moving Forward; Too Awake to Retreat
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
The body can still move forward, but a black line keeps pulling it back: movement without freedom under combined labour and emotional load.
Escape
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
The black enclosure is torn open. Instead of adapting or repairing, the body attempts a direct exit.
Monday, Get Up – Welcome the Sun
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Bright blue and yellow surroundings contrast with a collapsed body: the language says “get up,” while the body says otherwise.
Stiff Limbs
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Four bodily poses record the process of moving again after feeling “rusted,” and begin to turn the bird’s visual language toward rhythm, timing and motion.
Red + Blue – Relations
Red and blue first emerged as a pair and continue to operate as a flexible relational language.
Across these scenes, proximity, support, friction, play, memory and distance become visible through shared objects,
gestures, paths and small absurdities.
Shared Worlds
Everyday scenes of reunion, play and doing things together establish the pair through simple actions and oversized objects.
Hi!
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Two birds meet again beneath a passing plane. A brief greeting becomes a light scene of reunion, recognition and shared movement.
Taming the Limbs
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
An oversized game controller turns a shared activity into a small physical comedy of challenge, coordination and stubborn attempts to keep playing.
Exchange + Change
Shared weight, memory and care become material through objects, fragmentation and small acts between two bodies.
The Weight We Do Not Know
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Shared weights become a way to think through misunderstanding, emotional burden, reconciliation and the wish to recover love’s original intention.
Forgetful
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Memory dissolves and is pulled back into relation. Hurt, forgetting, attachment and return coexist in a two-part sequence of fragmentation and touch.
Life Goes On
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
One bird’s tears become something the other catches and carries. A bad day is allowed to remain bad while the small practical work of continuing goes on.
Play + Roles
The pair also functions as a comic cast, shifting between challenger, referee, reluctant returnee and whoever happens to be holding the food.
Don’t Hit the Referee
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
A mock trial-and-duel scene turns competing red birds and an outnumbered blue referee into a small piece of absurd stage business.
Hopelessly Attached
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
A study of contradictory attachment: wanting distance while repeatedly circling back toward the familiar, rendered as an exaggerated lure and return.
Distance + Boundaries
Lines, enclosures and colour fields turn the relationship into a question of position: how two figures remain connected, separated or interwoven inside a larger structure.
Contrasting Colours
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Opposition on the colour wheel becomes a relationship metaphor: difference is not removed, but made into the condition through which the two colours become legible together.
Interwoven
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
Red and blue remain far apart while black lines continue to weave around them, suggesting the residual texture of intimacy after it has receded from the foreground.
Happy April Fools’ Day, Miss Lawrence
2026 · Digital illustration · Procreate
A playful holiday reference places the pair on opposite sides of an oversized boundary, turning a deliberately silly drawing into a scene of separation and shared space.
Motion
Hand-drawn animation turns the bird from a fixed image into a sequence of related bodily states.
Minimal changes in pose carry rhythm, humour and shifts in emotional state.
Cheer Up!
2026 · Hand-drawn animation · Procreate
A short animation breaks a simple scene into discrete poses. The character remains graphically minimal while the sequence carries the change in state.
Stayin’ Alive
2026 · Hand-drawn animation · Procreate
Rhythm, repetition and bodily motion turn a short loop into a small self-resuscitation gag.
Code + Space
The same character is translated into rule-based variation and simple 3D form.
These experiments are less about changing medium for its own sake than testing what remains recognizable when the bird is rebuilt through different systems.
Getting Closer
2025 · R coding visualization
Changes in distance, repetition, position and expression create multiple instances that share the same visual grammar. The bird becomes a variable system rather than a single fixed image.
Building the Big Red Bean in 3D from Scratch
2025 · Blender modelling tests
A flat character is converted into a simple volume to test scale, viewpoint, depth and spatial presence. The experiment adds a 3D branch to the character without replacing its 2D identity.
Ongoing
What began as expression has slowly turned into a system.
This series continues to evolve.
New colours, forms, and narratives are still emerging – including the growing presence of yellow, which I see as a way to hold and balance the tensions between red, blue, and black.
In a way, this work is less about drawing birds, and more about building a space where I can exist, shift, and return.
