Luna & Fable

This one had a rough patch in the middle.

The sketch and the dark ground came together exactly as I wanted. Then I started collaging in the music score motif and nearly panicked. I was using methyl cellulose to adhere the paper, and it was too wet, smearing the dark background underneath it. There was a real moment where I wondered if I’d ruined the whole piece.

I switched to an acid-free glue stick and it went much better. But the smear marks are still there if you look closely, and I had to decide whether that bothered me.

It doesn’t. I love the juxtaposition of raw and clean in my work — the smudge against the precise line, the mess beside the considered mark. That contrast is one of the most exciting things to me about making art. The hard part is silencing my perfectionist instinct long enough to let it stay.

Once the heliconia leaves were in and I started painting Tále in his full color, I got excited about where this piece is headed. He’s a riot of red, orange, and gold against deep green, the most theatrical painting in the collection so far, and it’s finally starting to look like it.

Free illustrated page from inside the Dreaming Garden at the link in my bio.

The ancestor women have been dancing around this fire since long before Elleryn arrived.

This is the vision Umbára shows her — the women she came from, alive and present in the deep golden world just on the other side of the night garden. She watches from the cool green dark, and for the first time, she knows them.

A small ayahuasca vine blooms on her leg. The first mark of her inheritance.

The passionflower has been watching too.



Free illustrated page from inside the Dreaming Garden at the link in my bio.

The Ancestors’ Fire is finished, and I’m happier with this one than I was with the Threshold.

With every painting I make, I can feel my style getting closer to what feels most authentic and exciting to me. The process, the composition, the skill — all of it is evolving, slowly and genuinely, one painting at a time.

My favorite thing in this painting is Umbára the Howler Monkey, spanning the full canopy above the scene with those ancient amber eyes. But what I’m most proud of is something harder to name: the feeling that I actually communicated the emotional moment I wrote in the story. Elleryn watching the ancestor vision. The warmth of the fire bleeding into the night garden. The sense that something sacred is happening just out of reach.

This is painting two of seven in the Dreaming Garden narrative collection. The world is building.

Free illustrated page from inside the Garden at the link in my bio.

The Song of the Scarlet Macaw reference collage is done, and this one was pure joy to build.

This is the moment in the story when Elleryn begins to find her voice. Tále the Scarlet Macaw arrives in an explosion of scarlet and lands in her antlers — theatrical, urgent, magnificent. He sings into the silence until she sings back. It’s probably the most exuberant painting in the whole collection. We’re deep into the lush, intense color territory I love most, with saturated reds and pinks blazing against a dark background, heliconia pressing in from the edges, Cattleya orchids at the bottom, the ember heart burning in her chest.

I can’t wait to paint this one.

Free illustrated page from inside the Dreaming Garden at the link in my bio.

The Ancestors’ Fire is coming together.

Umbára the Howler Monkey is taking shape in the canopy above — warm, ancient, and somehow already full of personality despite not having eyes yet. The ancestor fire is in and it’s doing exactly what I hoped, warming the left side of the scene and pulling the eye toward the vision.

The trees are beginning to frame the scene at the edges, though I’m wondering if they need to go darker to really anchor the composition the way I want. Still deciding.

A lot of white space left to fill — Elleryn, the ancestor women, the botanical foreground. But the world is here. I can feel it.

Free illustrated page from inside the Dreaming Garden at the link in my bio.

The Ancestors’ Fire is underway.

The background is in and the silhouettes are drawn, and I have to say, Umbára the Howler Monkey might be my favorite thing I’ve drawn so far. Cute and mysterious in equal measure, watching from the canopy with those ancient amber eyes.

Today I start filling in the color. This is the scene I’ve been most looking forward to painting — the ancestor vision on the left, warm firelight bleeding into the night Garden, Elleryn watching from the right. The warmest, most alive moment in the first half of the collection.

The world is building one painting at a time.

Free illustrated page from inside the Dreaming Garden at the link in my bio.

Before I pick up a brush, I build the world in digital collage.

This is the reference collage for The Ancestors’ Fire, the second painting in the Dreaming Garden collection, and one I’ve been looking forward to since I first mapped out the story. Gathering reference images into one place before I begin helps me feel the painting before it exists. The color, the atmosphere, the emotional temperature of the scene.

This one has a compositional structure I love — a framing device inspired by illuminated manuscripts, the kind of threshold within a threshold that feels right for a scene about crossing into something ancient. Inside it: Elleryn, small and white, watching the ancestor vision on the left. Umbára, the howler monkey, spanning the full canopy above. The passionflower and orchids pressing in from the edges.

And those colors. I cannot wait to paint those colors.

The Dreaming Garden collection is underway. Free illustrated page from inside the world at the link in my bio.

botanical

The Threshold
Watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and collage on Stonehenge paper

The first doorway into The Dreaming Garden.

I wanted this painting to feel like the moment just before a forgotten world exhales. Not fully awake yet. Still dim at the edges. Waiting.

The warm light in Elleryn’s chest is the only thing beginning to answer the darkness ahead.

This piece took a long time to find its shape. I kept repainting the boundary between the forest and the Garden because I realized the world beyond the threshold needed to feel restrained at first, almost hushed, so that the later paintings can bloom into fullness.

There are passionflower vines hidden through the piece, the first tropical plants crossing into the colder forest beyond the gate.

More soon from the Garden.

There is a place beneath the waking world where forgotten stories continue to breathe.

Tonight I shared a new piece about The Dreaming Garden, the world behind the collection I’m currently painting. It’s a story about sleeping rivers, unwoven dreams, ancestral memory, and a white deer named Elleryn who enters a garden that seems to recognize her before she understands why.

I also finished the first painting for the collection this week: The Threshold.

For a long time this world existed only as fragments in sketchbooks and scattered notes. Finishing that painting felt like opening the first real doorway into it.

The Garden is waking in pieces.

You can read the full post on Substack through the link in my bio.

The Threshold is underway, and this is the moment I love most in a painting. Before the details, before the figures are rendered, before anything is finished — the background colours bloom together and the world arrives.

The ground is built from layered washes of deep forest green and black, with violet in the purple passages and indigo at the top. The moonlit path is painted with a Daniel Smith mineral watercolour called Sugilite Genuine. I love mineral watercolours for the way they carry an organic sparkle that no synthetic pigment quite replicates. The expressive marks and drips are ink, worked in while the surface was still responsive.

This is the first painting of the Dreaming Garden. Elleryn stands between worlds, the ember just beginning to glow in her chest, the Garden waiting ahead of her. There’s a long way to go. But the world is already here.

Free illustrated page from inside the Dreaming Garden at the link in my bio.