The Breakdown

No, not the "its 2026 and the rise of fascism has caused me to abuse substances" kind of breakdown (well okay, a bit of that kind). No, today I thought I'd write about my own work, providing both a technical and conceptual breakdown of the main processes I go through in creating a piece.

So, lets make like a KOL in front of a pile of snow, and dive in.

It starts with an idea, as simplistic and self evident as that sounds. Now sometimes theres only the kernel of an idea, sometimes it's actually an idealess emotional flashpoint that i let ruminate, until it cools and solidifies in to something more than just instinctual feeling. But the artwork does not really start to exist until the idea fully takes hold, until it matches a solidified conceptual exploration to the notion and emotion that fuelled it. Up until that point they're just feelings or fleeting thoughts at best.

Once they reach that point though, be it through persistent thought and conscious desire to explore a topic, or through the happenstance of inspiration, they're written down. That is how Id say I sketch, I don't make gestural marks on a page, I don't even doodle rough compositional layouts anymore. I just think, and eventually write down the idea on whatever surface or device is at hand.

With the the conceptual engineering thought through, its time to actually realise the idea. To render words as visuals (or as more words, as is often the case with my work). Almost always this involves opening the original A.I; Adobe Illustrator. Though quite often this is paired with opening several tabs and proceeding to do nothing in Illustrator whilst I spend the next few hours/days/weeks/months researching and obtaining materials to use in the construction.

Once I've sourced the materials for my build and brought them on site, then i can start throwing them at the page. Now over the years the size of this page has grown as both my technical and technological abilities and access has expanded and allowed for greater detail in the work. But generally "the page" starts around 40-50 inches, and my preferred aspect ratios are 1:1 and 4:5. (final outputs come out as 300dpi, but with illustrator being vector based that isn't important at at this stage.)

Menial details out of the way, back to throwing text around. Its usually something central, the core of the idea that gets realised first. I need something to hang the rest of the page off, and if needs be i need to solve the technical problem of creating certain visuals. In 'ATOM' it was the central sphere of braille letterforms, something i had struggled to achieve cleanly before. With 'AROUND' it was the grid of braille letters whose dots equal in number to the amount of nuclear weapons. In 'NOW' it was actually tracking down a good version of the background map and replacing each place name on it with an incident from research

Often at this early stage i will also make the brushes for the piece. I wont go step by step but in short illustrator lets you build custom brushes from any object, using a letterform as a base you can then add modifiers and go from there. Now not every piece needs these, and some times they actually come only at the end as added texture, but generally if im creating a form, be it a hand or a sphere, ill make them using these brushes.

We're starting to get somewhere now. There's probably some other text or imagery on the page at this point, pulled from my back catalogue of poems, or from that specific pieces research. These ancillary elements are initially thrown to the corners, i look to visually balance the page as i move chunks of text and charts around. At this stage in my career I have a good instinct for composition, and what parts of the page need a line of blended distorted words, and what parts need weighty paragraph. But i will still at times just let my cursor drift over the page whilst moving an element, half closing my eyes to blur the details and see where the balance lies. I have a number of snap and guide tools turned on in Illustrator to help in this, they let you quickly hang things in a controlled way even as my mouse drifts.

Once these are roughed in ill settle in to making some actual guidelines and maybe a full grid depending on the piece at hand. At the very least ill knock out room in the margins, give myself some guides to hang things off and make sure my spacings consistent.

(Those little steps in the process are actually something I think more artists could do with borrowing from their designer cousins. Moving rough blocks around the page, utilising the tech at hand to give a fluidity to the elements they're working in to their compositions, whilst also understanding how to provide better structure when its needed. But i digress.)

Now things are looking solid. We've got our block of marble roughed out, the foundations of the home and base structure are built. Now we just have to chip away at it, install all the things that take it from a structure to a home. And as anyone who is a fan of "Grand Designs" will tell you this stage can take far far longer than you think.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the somewhat inefficient way in which i work, I pick at a piece, i walk away and come back because i need my eyes to refresh, i let iterations ruminate. However a lot of the time taken this is just due to the fact that these are massive canvases, incredibly detail rich, some of them have over a hundred poems scattered throughout them. And whilst I've neatly structured the process here, there's often a lot more back and forth between the research and construction stages than I've made out.

After this stage of carving out the small details, comes the paint and polish, ill often bring the work in to photoshop. Here ill apply colour, distortions and additional texture. The chipping away continues as the paint highlights problems in the underlying form or inspires new additions, I bounce back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop until one or both crash.

Now I know the piece is near enough done.

I walk away for a day or two.

When i come back I look at it on my phone, my ipad, my TV. Checking how its contrast reads at scale and across differing screens types, making corrections as i see them.

Once everything is correct the last ting to do is try to summarise the work, so as to make a post about it. Maybe there's a central poem to pull from, or ill just reiterate the original idea as it was sketched down

And that is really it, it starts with words and ends with them, describing an idea.