Thirty Views is a series of small illustrated dioramas of the Collingwood-Fitzroy neighbourhood created over three months.
I started the series after taking time away from work to create my own digital tool. That meant spending every day talking about AI while facing a stream of investment stalemates.
It became dispiriting. I needed to enjoy the everyday again and return to making by hand.
So I set myself a challenge: create thirty hand-crafted scenographic illustrations of the neighbourhood I love.
The dimensional illustrations start as line drawings, with watercolour washes and ink applied selectively. Each scene is cut into three to four planes and mounted on foam board at different depths, creating genuine physical dimensionality inside the box frame.
The layered construction echoes the experience of walking through the neighbourhood itself, where trees, tram wires, shopfronts and alleys reveal themselves one plane at a time.
The resulting thirty views are part set design and part illustration, created with a medium that cannot be truly recreated digitally