My Story

I have always had a very keen interest in maritime history. Since a young age, I have always grown up on or around boats to some degree, in fact I've know the sailing life ever since I can remember.

I was born in Scotland, but from the age of three was raised in the South of France.

We discovered sailing not long after when my parents bought our first boat 'Waterline'. Then in 2002, we bought our second boat 'Desperado', and during the summertime we would cruise around the Mediterranean, sailing over to Italy, Tunisia, Greece... We did this until my family and me decided that we wanted to do something much bigger.

When I was ten years old, me and my family embarked on a circumnavigation of the world on our 40ft sailing yacht 'Escapado'. After buying the boat in New York, we sailed through the West Indies, over the top of South America, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, up the Eastern coast of Australia to South East Asia, back across the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, across the South Atlantic and back up to the Caribbean. In total we travelled approximately 38,000 nautical miles over a five year period, travelling through some of the roughest seas imaginable and experiencing some of the most amazing countries and cultures. We then spent the next two years on the island of Grenada in the Caribbean where I finished my schooling and eventually returned to the UK in 2012, having lived on the boat for a total of seven years. I was ten years old when we set off and seventeen when I finally got back to the UK, so this took up a fairly large chunk of my life.

Later on I went to university, graduating in 2019 with a BSc in Navigation and Maritime Science.

When we were at sea, especially on long ocean passages which could sometimes take weeks or even months to complete, one of the only forms of entertainment on the boat for me was to draw. I would crudely stick pieces of A4 paper together and draw ships across them using pencils. Even as a child, trying to get all of the details correct right down to the rivets in the hull was very important to me and I would sometimes spend hours trying to get it just right. But with no internet on the boat and hardly any books on ships with me, it was sometimes difficult. When I look back these old pencil drawings seem primitive to me now.

This is when I started looking into digital art which for the longest time I had never really considered, until one night during my time at university I decided to have a go at using MS Paint. From there my skills grew more and more eventually growing out of MS Paint and starting to use much more advanced programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and since then, I have never looked back.

I now create profiles of many different types of vessels, from sailboats to huge ocean liners and even though I now use a computer to create my work, the style of my illustrations has remained the same.