For the love of exploration and learning

Hello! I’m Talweez. I love to travel, explore, sketch, paint, create illustrations and write.

I mainly use watercolour and gouache. I supplement these tools with pen and ink and watercolour pencils.

Here you’ll find sketches, nature journal pages, illustrations, paintings and writings about the places, people, creatures and stories encountered on the way.

There will also be information on materials and resources I’ve found useful in my practice.

Finally, I hope to share stories and snippets from my journeys discovering place, people and myself, on a quest to connect and engage with the world more deeply and mindfully.

Outside of art and illustration, I enjoy working with NGOs and organisations that provide a useful service to the world. I have supported them in admin, research, training, fundraising, project planning and grant writing.

My Story and coming back to sketching and painting

From a young age, like so many, I doodled, sketched, painted and just made things. Over the years, this fell to the wayside as other interests, work and opportunities came up.

I continued to dabble, sketching and painting a few pieces again in 2017, before and just after I moved to Samoa. I took some local classes on weaving and fabric printing while there, but it was never a consistent practice.

When in Fiji at the end of 2019, sitting on a pristine beach in Vanuabalavu, looking out at some beautiful wading birds, I had to pick up my pen and sketch its silhouette.

Over the next few months while settling into Indonesia, I found myself sketching on paper, and decorating our house with beautiful Batik wrapping paper - exercising those creative muscles again after a little while. Then Covid hit, and my work there ended for the moment, sending me home to Perth, WA.

After all the cleaning and organising I could do was done, I decided I wanted to devote some time to a pursuit I could really get stuck in - whether it was learning a language, dance, writing or some other thing, I did not know at the time.

I just sat on my desk to see what would inspire me, and felt an urge to draw, so out came all of the old art supplies and I just sketched for a few days. That was the spark.

A few days became a few months. I sketched, drew and and painted every day, and as anyone else who has kept up a regular creative practice will attest, I saw my skill grow quickly and tangibly.

When I started, I did not know where it would go. I just sketched and doodled vines and flowers like I always had. Then I started sketching and painting flowers I’d seen, which really lit a light bulb.

Turns out, what I had needed throughout the years, was a ‘why’ - why sketch, paint or write beyond just self-indulgence (which had never been enough for me). My ‘why’ was and is a desire to learn, to see more and to understand more.

Our walks were inspiration and instead of just trying to capture the beauty of nature in photographs, I now had another tool - my sketchbooks - and the more I sketched, drew and painted, the more I learned and wanted to learn.

I look forward to sketching, painting and drawing all the time now, and while the process of creating is in itself rewarding and puts me in a state of ‘flow’, it is actually the excitement of learning something new, observing the interesting patterns on a beautiful lizard, closely observing various shades of purple on Marri gum nuts or noticing something odd about the shape or colour of a bird’s eyes that keeps me coming back for more.