Books, cards & the work on the page.
Every piece here — children's book spreads, a full card game deck, field sketches from my own practice — is illustrated by hand, in-house. No stock art, no outsourcing. This page pulls together everything from the wider portfolio that's specifically about the illustration.
← Back to full portfolioStarted small. Still going.
Started as a Saturday language class in 2011 — a small room, a feeling the language was slipping through the generation gap. Thirteen years later it's a publishing imprint, a card game company, and a podcast. The books, the art, the card illustrations — all of it made in-house, by hand.
Every page is illustrated, not sourced — the art carries as much of the story as the words do.
A hat blows away in four languages.
A short illustrated story built to teach language transfer, not just vocabulary — matching phrases are color-coded across English, Filipino, Japanese, and Spanish, so a reader can see how the same sentence reshapes itself page to page. Same dog, same cat, same hat, four languages holding the story together.
I work with a lot of English language learners, and I've been learning Japanese myself — enough that it's become more than a hobby. I kept noticing that adults would benefit from small stories like this too, something a parent and a child could actually read side by side and both learn from. A book doesn't have to be complicated to be for grown-ups.
Painted from life, on location.
I'm a Certified Nature Journal Educator through the Wild Wonder Foundation (John Muir Laws) — this is the practice behind the workshops I've taught, kept up on my own time, on location, in whatever light and weather shows up. Pages from my own sketchbook. See the Bolsa Chica Conservancy case study →
It's where I find my peace. When everything is moving and there's a lot expected of me, sitting outside with watercolors forces me to slow down and actually appreciate what's in front of me.
A sample from a 90-card deck.
Salo Salo Sabotage is a 90-card party game — Food, Guests, and Fun to collect, plus Action, Sabotage, Counter, Kultura, and Wild cards to complicate the table. These nine are a sample, designed and illustrated from concept to production for my own card game. Every guest card is framed the way you'd actually see them arrive — the borders trace the geometry of Filipino tribal tattoo, every description sits over a woven banig (sleeping mat) pattern, and the same eight-ray sun from the flag rises behind every guest card. See the full product case study →
Built from scratch, not a brand brief.
The books and the card deck are illustration in service of a story or a product. This is the other half — original character concepts, worked out for their own sake.
Let's work together.
Creative direction. Program management. Cultural content.
If the project has something real at stake — a community, a culture, a story that matters — that's the lane. I work best when the project matters — to the people making it and the people it reaches.