Illustrator | Animator | Designer

'Sup? I'm Lucas,
I'm a freelance graphic designer and self-taught animator and illustrator who likes mixing things up and trying new styles. Currently trying to teach myself how to get good at hand drawn lettering with varying levels of success.
When I’m not trying to make cool stuff I play a ton of video games and or try to track down inspiration for whatever I decide I want to work on next.

NatureArt Lab Books

Publications - 2023/2024

NatureArt Lab often does guided ecotourism trips in Australia and across the globe. Participants of these tours then submit all the photos they took and artworks they created and I collate them into these tour books. I'm in charge of almost every aspect of the design and content, from making sure every image gets used and that each participant gets equal representation to writing the blurbs for each chapter.
These are mostly tests of technical skills and problem solving, figuring out what images get used where, keeping the book visually interesting and in a rough chronological order and making sure everything is optimised for printing.
As of writing this I've done 3 of these books, each about 200 - 300 pages long.

NatureArt Lab Calendar

Calendar - 2024

Second calendar I've made for NatureArt Lab. These calendars are unique in that they have monthly "phenology" events, which are seasonal or monthly goings on in nature.
I was in charge of design, image collation, editing, research for phenology events and writing most of the copy.

NatureArt Lab Brochures

Publication - 2024

Brochure design I made for NatureArt Lab. They wanted something a bit more contemporary and the design I created also became the theme for the updated style guide.

NatureArt Lab Ecotourism Posters

Poster Design - 2024

Collateral designed for NatureArt Lab's ecotourism efforts, known internally as Nature Tours. These are more decorative than the usual class collateral I handle for them.

Ruckus

Animation - 2024

This is a piece I made for my sibling's birthday. Made in After Effects, drew the cat separately and created the smoke entirely in AE.

Discipline Over Distance: Showreel

Showreel - 2022

This is my showreel for the first year graphic design exhibition at CIT for 2021, Discipline over Distance. Most of my prior After Effects experience has been with animation in a single shot, so this was my first real go at transitioning from one shot to another smoothly.

PSYCHO KINETIC

Animated Typeface - 2023

"...You may want to adjust your set."

Just a piece I whipped up for fun, mostly as an excuse to mess with animating noise and loops. Wanted to go for a sort of Twilight Zone esque look with the colour and type style.

Night Shift: Sponsor Reel

Animated Reel - 2022

This was a sponsor/name reel I created for our exhibition, Night Shift. The countdown portion and the old movie effects like the dust, vignette and colour flickering were created for some showreel sleights that never came to be. Being able to reuse them for this saved a lot of time. The text was animated using feathered masks and the expression "wiggle" to emulate the old school jitter a lot of old films have. The type design was based on the Night Shift logo I designed for the exhibition.

Take it Or Leaf it

Packaging Design - 2021

This is a package design for a fictional tea brand called "Take it or Leaf it." I mainly took inspiration from vintage matchboxes and coffee brands for the illustrative work, layout and colour palette. The fake ad/mockup was constructed in Blender, with some editing in Photoshop afterwards, it's based on Halloween ads from the 90's and early 00's.

Onett Burger

Brand Identity - 2024

This is a personal project I took as an exercise to create a brand identity for a fictional small town take away. The store is from a game titled EarthBound. When you start a new file in EarthBound you are asked what your favourite "flavour" is, mint, banana, strawberry, peanut or plain, this choice changes how your UI looks for the game. I decided to use these "flavours" as a basis for my palettes, with a few tweeks.I wanted the menu to have an old school diner sort of feel with bold type and illustrationsThis is still a work in progress, as I'm hoping to also create a few more mockups and a short logo animation

Monsters in Canberra

Photo Series - 2021

These are a series of photos I took in and around Civic, Canberra. I wanted to tell the story of a person looking into a Monster that's been spotted in and around the CBD since the 1950's, with news reports and witness sketches to give a bit more background to some of the more vague photos. It's laid out like a classic detective/police pin board, with relevant locations, photos and news reports/sketches linked to each other.

Ales From The Crypt

Beer Can Mockups - 2022

These are a set of beer can mockups I did with two other people for a class assignment. The prompt was "Under The Influence" but we couldn't directly reference beer or drug usage in our interpretations. We decided to base our lineup on Australian Cryptids, cryptids are creatures that don't actually exist but many people believe they do eg: Bigfoot, Mothman, Aliens etc.I also handled the 3D marketing mockups for all 6 cans as well, although only the two designs shown here, the Bunyip and the Hoop Snake, are mine.

Retro Gamer

Cover and Spread Mockup - 2021

This is a mockup of a cover and spread for the magazine Retro Gamer, I’m a pretty big fan of games and I really like Retro Gamers emphasis on images and theming.
I was initially going to make the main focus of the cover a game called EarthBound but decided against it because wrangling anything from that game to work at 300 dpi probably would’ve been a difficult task.

Weekly Images

2022

These are a series of one-per-week images that I created for my Graphic Design diploma. Every week, we got a prompt and had to create an image in Photoshop using at least one photo or image we ourselves created, otherwise anything was fair game.
The prompts this year were:
Solar Powered Future, Golden Hour, Weird Science, Colour Theory, Worlds With Worlds, Fight the Power, Pretty in Pink and Bleak Obsession.

NatureArt Lab Gift Card

Publication and Web Design - 2023

This is a pair of Gift Card designs I did for NatureArt Lab, one is a design for a physical gift card and the other is meant to be delivered digitally via email. This was one of the first major projects I did for NAL and was the basis for the style guide I later created for them.

The Banksia artwork used is by Canberra artist Dr. Fiona Boxall.

NatureArt Lab Branding Guidelines

Style Guide - (2023/2024)

This is a complete style guide/ set of branding guidelines I created for NatureArt Lab, covering everything from logo and typeface usage to tone of voice and image guidelines. I wanted to create something professional while capturing NatureArt Lab's kindness and creativity.

This was also my first major project created using Affinity Publisher instead of Adobe InDesign.

Poster and Logo Design - 2022

Bass Coast Shorts is a short film festival held on the coast south east of Melbourne. I wanted to capture the feel of a calm, beachy event while not making it feel too much like a surf festival. The poster was something I made to have a better feel for the logo in context.This was done as a part of an assignment and was presented to an actual client, they gave me permission to display it in my portfolio regardless of whether or not it ended up being used.I ended up going through a lot of ideas before deciding on a direction I liked.The final logo was created by using the font Casey as a base for a script hand-drawn logo. The supporting type is Rammetto One.

Infographic and Logo Design - 2022

Tucker Bocks is a concept for a sustainable T-shirt printing business, specializing in hemp shirts. I wanted to create a brand that I’d want to buy clothes from. I also designed something that I think they’d put out as a shirt design and an infographic that would come with any purchased shirt.The typeface for Tucker Bocks is hand-drawn and vectorised In Illustrator using brushes that retained it's hand-drawn look, the mascot dog was created in the same way.

Disintegration

3D Render and Photo Compositing - 2022

Disintegration is a piece made by combining photography and Photoshop manipulation with 3D rendered graphics made in the program Blender. The imagery is based on the song of the same name by The Cure.

Logo Design - 2022

Hellvetica was the result of my initial take at creating a name and identity for our advanced diploma graduation exhibition. I wanted to create an identity with a snappy, memorable name while also being something that designers could relate to or find funny.

Caterwaul

Poster Design - 2022

This piece is something I created initially as a part of a 90 minute design challenge during the Diploma of Graphic Design course. As a part of the Advanced Diploma I decided to refine it into a finalized project. The lead type is hand drawn and inspired by various old school and indie band posters. The supporting type is Screature which just happens to come with an alternative style that allows for two-tone styles which allowed it to fit very nicely with the Hero type.

Night Shift

Logo Design and Illustration - 2022

After we decided on Night Shift as a name for our advanced diploma graduating exhibition, we all had to design our own takes on what we thought it would look like. I interpreted it as a late night shift pulp horror movie starring skeletons and zombies, because don’t we all feel that way after one too many all-nighters?I came up with two takes on this, a more vintage, grungy style and a cleaner, vector style. We ended up using the former for most of the branding but the latter was helpful for more physical media, such as invitations.

Sculptural Typography

2022

As a part of the Advanced Diploma of Graphic Design, we were required to collaborate on a sculptural type piece based on our exhibition identity, which was called Night Shift.
My contributions included the idea for the "Awake" type being projected onto the wall by another lightsource. The stencils for the type for the "Awake" and the "Still." As well as helping assemble the Awake type and cutting the Still out of the box and the coloured folders we used to give it an alarm clock like glow.

Lucas McGrath

About

I work as a freelance graphic designer/illustrator and am currently working for NatureArt Lab as a graphic designer while still freelancing. I’m a self taught illustrator who decided to learn graphic design after enough people asked me to make logos for them. I also have prior training in game art/animation and motion graphics so I have a pretty varied and solid skillset. When I’m not working I play a ton of video games in my spare time and love drawing/modeling cute or cool monsters and creatures. I own two dogs, Daisy and Bandit and basically live off of tea, maybe I drink too much of it, who knows?

Services

I can do illustration, logo design, motion graphics, 3D mockups, packaging design and poster design. I know how to use all of the following programs: The Adobe Suite, Affinity Suite, Blender and have some experience in Maya and ZBrush.