Works On Paper

This page brings together original works on paper, from small studies to more developed pieces. Each one holds the same visual language found across Emily’s practice, in a more direct and intimate form.

Run For The Hills

30 x 21 cm

Watercolour and ink pen on paper

Ink pen drawing overlays and anchors the surface. Contour-like lines, small symbols, and repeated mark clusters create a cartographic effect, as if the scene is being mapped rather than illustrated. Warm ochre fragments and a concentric, topographic motif introduce a second register of pattern, holding the work between landscape, diagram, and narrative trace.

Hybrid creatures function as a signature within Emily’s practice. Here, the figure is used as a vehicle for freedom and motion, less a character than an embodied gesture. Its posture and the surrounding marks suggest a dance with wind and terrain, carried by soft hues and shifting lines. The piece suggests movement through unstable ground, where direction is felt rather than fixed.

The Sea Mouth

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Acrylic and ink pen on paper

The Sea Mouth is built through layered staining and dense line. Blue fields spread across the sheet like tide pools or coral growth, while ink contours map the image with repeated rings and channels. A bright yellow ground pushes through in pockets, creating a sense of light behind sediment. The work holds a tension between flow and containment, where the surface behaves like a coastline that is constantly reshaped.

Blue Cartography

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Acrylic and ink pen on paper

This work combines acrylic staining with fine ink line to create a topographic surface that shifts between map, current, and microscopic life. Indigo pools spread in branching, coral-like forms, while lighter washes bloom into tide marks. Over and around these fields, pen line traces contour paths and cellular clusters. The piece proposes a system rather than a scene, with detail accumulating like data, memory, or weather.

Spring Scene

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Watercolour and ink on paper

Spring Scene is a dense field drawing built from light watercolour washes and continuous ink line. Soft pinks, apricot, and pale blue create an airy ground, while coral-like fragments, spirals, and plant forms accumulate across the sheet. The image reads as a habitat made from small observations and invented marks, where nothing is central and everything is in motion.

Ink contours hold the composition together through repetition and rhythm. Lines loop, ripple, and cluster, creating a sense of growth spreading in multiple directions at once. Watercolour is kept translucent, allowing overlaps and stains to remain visible, so the surface feels layered rather than filled.

Hue's Of All To Come

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Acrylic and ink pen on paper

This piece balances soft staining with precise ink mapping. Blue and pink areas bloom into one another, forming a shifting ground that suggests tide, sediment, and suspended matter. Ink marks hold the surface in place through contour patterns and small reef-like motifs. The image reads as a study of movement and dispersion, where colour behaves like weather passing across a mapped surface.

The Deep

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Acrylic and ink pen on paper

A large blue wash occupies the centre of the sheet, edged by white paper and a tight matrix of ink contours. Linework accumulates like topographic recording, with spirals, channels, and repeated currents pressing against the stained areas. The contrast between open white space and saturated blue produces depth without perspective, suggesting a submerged terrain where structure is traced, not described.

Warm Waters

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Watercolour and ink on paper

This work is built through a split field of heat and water. Warm yellows and soft pinks sweep across the left side in layered washes, while cool turquoise and pale blue gather on the right, creating a tidal divide. Ink line and dotted marks map the surface with contour-like paths, small cellular clusters, and coral-shaped forms that appear and dissolve through the stain.

The composition reads as a moving system rather than a fixed image. Shapes drift, merge, and re-form, with repetition and rhythm replacing traditional focal point. The tension between the warm and cool zones gives the piece its structure, suggesting flow, exchange, and the meeting of different environments. It sits between landscape and microscopy, where colour behaves like weather and ink behaves like record.

Tidal Static

Acrylic and ink pen on paper

This work is built through dense blue fields and over drawn ink line. Stained passages sit under a network of quick marks, creating a surface that feels both mapped and eroded. Yellow fragments cut through the blues like signal, while black pools and small figures appear and recede in the layering. The composition holds the feeling of a current carrying debris, where forms surface briefly, then dissolve back into the field.

The Breeze Is Alive

29.7 x 21.0 cm
Watercolour and ink on paper

A single flower-like form sits at the centre of the sheet, built from translucent washes of mint green and warm ochre, edged with fine line and dotted marks. The petals feel porous and shifting, as if the image is forming and dissolving at the same time. Around it, dark spore shapes radiate outward with white flicks and drifting ink trails, creating a sense of movement across a smoky grey ground.

The work balances delicacy and disruption. Soft watercolour blooms are held against sharper ink punctures, with scatter marks and stains suggesting airborne drift, decay, and renewal. Rather than a botanical study, the piece reads as a microscopic scene enlarged, where growth and breakdown share the same surface.

Independant paintings

Spectral

29.7 x 21.0 cm

Acrylic on paper

This work stages a figure within a simplified interior and landscape. A pink, mask-like head sits forward in the composition, while a red, folded form moves across the lower half like fabric, shelter, or body. Behind it, flat fields of turquoise and yellow create a sharp division of space, with a crescent moon and small star marks introducing a quiet night register.

The painting is built through clean colour blocks and softened gradients. Hard edges are reserved for key structural shapes, while the figure is modelled with blended tones that keep it slightly unreal. The scene reads as both domestic and dreamlike, where perspective is compressed and objects feel symbolic rather than descriptive.

The work holds a tension between intimacy and distance. The figure appears present but unreadable, and the surrounding shapes function as stage elements, suggesting a private space shaped by memory, sleep, and quiet observation.

The Stray

29.7 cm x 21.0 cm

Watercolour and ink on paper

This work is a portrait of a stray cat, painted from close observation. Layered grey black washes build the fur in soft shifts, with fine ink and lifted highlights catching the whiskers and edges of the face. The eyes are held in warm amber, giving the portrait its centre of gravity and a steady, alert presence.

A circular, woodgrain-like halo sits behind the head, framing the cat without turning the image into a scene. Scattered leaf forms around the figure suggest the patio setting and a sense of season, keeping the composition simple and contained.

The piece is rooted in lived encounter. The cat visited regularly, arrived pregnant, and later gave birth. The portrait functions as a record of that relationship, care, return, and the continuation of life, with the adopted kittens sitting quietly behind the image as its context.

Angel's Vice

29.7 x 21.0 cm

Watercolour and ink on paper

This work stages a dreamlike sky scene built from light watercolour wash and fine ink drawing. A field of cloud forms moves across a pale blue ground, layered with speckled texture and soft tonal shifts. Dark, horned hybrid figures appear among the clouds, rendered as silhouettes with bright eyes, giving the sky a sense of inhabitants rather than weather.

A thin tree rises on the left, its branches spreading into the upper frame like a second layer of line. In the lower right, a cropped figure appears, partially present, partially withheld, anchoring the composition in the body while keeping the scene open and unsettled.

The piece holds a balance between tenderness and unease. The watercolour keeps the atmosphere light and drifting, while the ink contours introduce structure, repetition, and narrative suggestion. It reads as a quiet fable, where landscape becomes psychological space and the creatures function as markers of presence, memory

Spore Tears

10.5 x 14.8 cm

Watercolour and ink on paper

This small work centres on a mushroom-like form drawn in loose contour and held in warm ochre, rust, and smoke grey washes. The cap bends across the top of the composition, with dark pigment pooling at the edge and thinning into translucent stains. Droplet marks hang around the form, suggesting seep, fall, and release rather than literal rain.

Negative space is used as structure. A pale ground allows the line and colour to breathe, while small accent shapes in green and brown anchor the lower section like fragments of growth. The balance of fluid wash and controlled outline keeps the image between botanical reference and abstraction, reading as an intimate study of form, fragility, and quiet movement.

Shifting Heart

29.7 x 21.0 cm

Watercolour and ink on paper

This work places a small, partially obscured face within a field of broken colour blocks. Teal, green, and warm ochre panels sit like floating tiles, separated by thin ink contours and areas of pooled brown wash that spread and stain into the paper. The face appears as an interruption in the grid, emerging through pattern and bleed rather than being fully drawn.

The composition reads as fragmentation and reassembly. Forms feel held together by edges, seams, and negative space, with the ink line acting like a boundary that contains the fluidity of the wash. The surface retains evidence of spill and migration, allowing the painting to sit between portrait and map.

The result is a figure caught inside shifting structure, where identity is suggested through partial visibility, and the surrounding field behaves like terrain, unstable, layered, and in motion.

Out Of Body Dream

Gouache on paper

A landscape of pastel, floaty colour and hybrid creatures. At the centre, a vivid figure stands in a surreal scene of soft clouds and shifting light. The space is abstract and defies reality, held together by simple forms and bold line. The work sits in a dreamlike register, offering a brief escape into serenity and quiet melancholy.

Soft Botanicals

This collection brings together a series of floral studies made through close looking and loose, responsive mark making. Working mainly with water based colour, Emily allows washes to bloom and settle on the paper, then returns with line and detail to hold each stem, petal, and leaf in place. Some pieces stay simple and iconic, a single flower against open space, while others build into fuller clusters and garden-like scenes.

Soft gradients, shifting edges, and bright, lifted colour give the works a lightness that feels seasonal and immediate. Seen together, the group reads like a visual diary of growth and change, small observations made tender through colour, rhythm, and repetition.

To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key.

These small studies bring together illustrative fragments from Emily’s wider world. Each piece focuses on a single form, birds, mushrooms, moths, and animal figures, shifting between the observed and the imagined. Working at an intimate scale allows line, colour, and texture to stay immediate, with details built through patient mark making rather than heavy layering.Some studies lean into fantasy, where creatures feel slightly altered or symbolic. Others stay closer to nature, recording structure, pattern, and surface. Seen together, the collection reads like a visual notebook, a series of small, contained images that test motif, mood, and character before they reappear in larger works.

21.0 x 14.8 cm

Water based media and ink on paper

A seated figure is held in a sparse, grey interior, outlined in soft blues that bleed into the paper like shadow or spill. A bright yellow, hybrid animal rises beside them, its single eye turned upward, with a speech bubble offering departure. Blue streams run down from the body and into the ground, turning emotion into weather and movement.

The work sits in a dream logic where comfort arrives through strangeness. Flat fields of colour, simple contour, and minimal detail keep the scene direct, while the contrast between cool greys and high yellow intensifies the sense of escape. It reads as a small allegory of rescue, tenderness, and leaving a difficult place behind.

I Will Take You Away

I Wept On The Cliff

29.7 x 21.0 cm

Water based media and ink on paper

A single figure stands on the edge of a blue cliff beneath an oversized sun. Hair falls in long ribbons that drip into the sea, where concentric rings and patterned water suggest tears turning into surface and tide. The scene is built from flat fields of bright yellow and cool blue, held by clean contour line and simple, emblem-like shapes.

Text sits within the image as part of the composition, placing the work between drawing and diary entry. The figure’s posture reads as off-balance but deliberate, a moment of release at the boundary between land and water. The piece holds grief without drama, using repetition and pattern to suggest transformation, leaving something behind, and carrying less weight forward.

The Wanderer

21.0 cm (H) x 14.8 cm (W)

Water based media and ink on paper

A single hybrid figure stands frontally in a simplified landscape, surrounded by flat colour and sparse plant forms. Soft pinks and pale blues give the body a gentle, almost toy-like presence, while the face holds a sharper edge, tired eyes and a small mouth of teeth that shifts the tone from cute to uncanny. Small flower motifs sit underfoot, and the hand-lettered text anchors the image like a caption from a private note.

The work uses illustration as a direct emotional register. Clean contour line and minimal shading keep the scene immediate, while the contrast between sweetness and unease suggests uncertainty, drifting, and the discomfort of not knowing where you belong. The result is a small, self-contained narrative that reads as both character study and quiet confession.