Food-focused illustration shifts colour toward painterly textures and surfaces, producing palettes derived from how drawn elements look and feel. Colour becomes the starting point, with careful palette planning before delicate digital layering and blending. Editorial commissions extend the work into natural and broader themes, including illustrations for Wordle Review and Bloomberg Business Weekly. A plant-free commission for Queer Atmosphere creates visuals about wet clay and messy hands, collaborating with Coldcuts on a new visual identity. The next creative phase moves toward animation, expanding fluid mark making into compositions where flowers, critters, and even iced coffee stirring appear in motion. Rules for palettes and composition support the development of motion languages that remain true to the artist’s style.
"“It's definitely leant more into the painterly side,” she says, and new palettes have emerged from the different textures and surfaces of food the illustrator has drawn - like her airy line up of deserts that look like they would melt in the mouth. Now finding that colour tends to be her starting point, Steph carefully plans her palette's before starting the delicate layering and blending process that builds up each digital piece."
"This personal work has led Steph to a number of editorial illustration commissions both immersed in the natural world and beyond - you may have spotted the illustrator's work in The New York Times Wordle Review or Bloomberg Business Weekly. A “plant-free” commission that the artist got the chance to work on this year that consisted of a series of illustrations for Queer Atmosphere, an inclusive and diverse collective of ceramic artists across the US, which saw Steph shape up a set of visuals surrounding wet clay and messy hands in collaboration with Brooklyn-based branding studio Coldcuts for the organisations new visual identity."
"“I love how they saw how my play with painterly colour could work for wet clay, fire and raku glazing,” she says. For the next phase of her creative work, Steph has been set on making things move, progressing her fluid mark making into compositions where flowers float out of frame or critters crawl, and even small things like the slow stir of an iced coffee come to life."
"This progression into animation is what's most exciting to Steph about her practice at present, it's a way to gamify her personal projects and stay inspired and to prolific. Sticking to some rules surrounding colour palettes and composition has meant that the illustrator has been able to develop motion languages in her work that feel true to her in this shift: “even the most simple rules really help in the journey to something a little new,”"
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