Behind the Scenes
How Each Piece Comes Together
Every piece starts as a story before it's ever a print. Here's an inside look at how a few of them came together — the inspiration, the challenges, the joys, the hours, and what it all means. More stories are added here as each piece gets its own.
From the sketchbook
Worked out page by page in Copic marker, ruler in hand.
Click a photo to look closer.
Behind this piece
How this one came together
Inspiration
A shop window in one of Sydney’s busiest centres, and six watches with more mechanics on show than I’d ever really looked at. I started imagining before I even knew the brand’s own story.
These six watches caught me somewhere I didn’t expect it — a shop window in Broadway Shopping Centre, one of the busiest centres in Sydney. It wasn’t the colour that stopped me first, or even the unusual case shapes. It was the mechanics — all that intricate, visible motion, doing its work in plain sight.
I found out afterwards that the brand has its own story — a founder, Switzerland, all of it. But by then I’d already started imagining one of my own.
Challenges
Six watches, not one — each needed its own angle, its own scale, its own small details right. Even the case they sit in took as much care as the watches themselves.
Six watches, not one. Every one had to hold its own angle, its own light, its own scale relative to the others — look closely and the ones at the bottom sit slightly larger than the ones at the top.
The branding on each dial is small and exact, easy to get slightly wrong. And once the watches themselves were right, the piece still wasn’t finished — the case they sit in needed its own shading and colour, without losing the sense of wonder that started the whole thing on a single sheet of A4.
Joys
Drawing makes you actually look. I found the etched slogans, the leather versus steel, the skeleton mechanics underneath — and got a little lost imagining how it all moves.
Drawing something forces you to actually look at it, properly. I kept noticing things I’d have walked straight past otherwise — a slogan etched into a dial, leather on one strap and steel on the next, the exposed skeleton of the movement underneath.
There’s something genuinely magical about an automatic watch — no battery, just motion. Trying to imagine how it works while drawing it was half the fun.
Time
About four to five months of early mornings, five or six days a week, an hour or two at a time. Roughly 150–200 hours, all told.
Around four to five months, most early mornings before the day properly started — five or six mornings a week, anywhere from an hour to two and a half or three hours a sitting.
Alongside a few other pieces on the go at the same time. Roughly 150–200 hours, all told — an estimate, not a stopwatch.
Meaning
This piece’s tale is about a traveller who trades riches for a watch’s “wonderful power.” Making it, I understood the trade — some things are worth more than what they cost.
I keep coming back to a simple-sounding question: what is time? The longer you sit with it, the less simple it gets — whether it’s something real, or something we’ve agreed to believe in, whether it can be travelled at all.
That’s exactly the question this piece’s own tale plays with: a traveller carries this same watch into the deep past, and a ruler is so beguiled by its “wonderful power” that they trade away half their riches just to possess it — not for what it’s worth, but for the magic of what it does.
That’s not so far from how I felt looking at the real thing: a small mechanical object that might keep working, quietly, for a hundred years or more, moved by nothing but being worn. The tale imagines someone trading riches for that feeling. Making this piece was my own version of the same trade.
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