Color by Numbers

Before YouTube, I spent a year at a mobile game studio making illustrations for a color-by-number app. The brief sounds simple: pretty scenes, clear shapes, satisfying palettes. But the actual challenge was interesting - every image had to work twice. Once as a finished illustration, and once as a puzzle, where flat areas of colour become the whole point.
Egypt, Slovenia, Prague, a whale carrying a whole world on its back. The subject matter was cheerful and the deadlines were real. It was good, focused work, and a completely different muscle than everything that came after.