Portland-based illustrator Rebecca Zwanzig makes digital pictures that feel like half-remembered road trips. Working under the name High West Wild, she draws on a childhood spent moving around the United States and on early trips to auctions and estate sales with her grandmother in rural Kentucky. The patterns on old plates, the embroidery on tablecloths, vintage textiles and small keepsakes that had clearly belonged to someone else all feed into her work, giving it a mix of familiarity and strangeness.

Her pictures usually start on paper. Zwanzig sketches each composition by hand before rebuilding it in Procreate or Adobe Illustrator, layering soft gradients that echo the texture of oil paint, a medium she still returns to alongside her graphic design background. The subjects are drawn from the natural and domestic worlds she has lived among: botanicals, moths, crystals, shells and flowers, arranged with a symmetry that recalls Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement and the pattern books of William Morris. She also cites Victorian textiles, antique dishware, folk art, scientific botanical illustration and the bold lettering of the 1960s and 1970s, with a palette that swings between earthy, decade-specific tones and darker, moodier colour or bright saturation.

The profile, published by Colossal on October 26, notes that Zwanzig's commercial clients have included Starbucks, Marine Layer, Anna Sui and Free People. She is currently working on a personal project to design a complete tarot deck, and visitors in Seattle next month will be able to see her work in person at the Renegade Craft Fair, which runs from November 20 to 22. The appeal of the work lies in that balance she strikes between the suburban and the sublime: ordinary objects and roadside sights, rendered with enough care that they start to feel quietly extraordinary.