Creating things for my own enjoyment, sanity, and for a living.
About link h2
Hobart-born Alexander Barnes-Keoghan’s multi-faceted skillset comes from a background in UX Design, Learning Resources, and Natural History Illustration.
A strong passion for both traditional and digital wildlife illustration, sculpture, and photography is evident across his work.
He has contributed to both traditional and virtual gallery experiences developed alongside the School of Creative Industries Technical Team at the University of Newcastle, you can explore some of this work here , here and here .
Graduate of a Bachelor of Natural History Illustration (2017) and a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design (Hons) (2021) at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Currently living in Melbourne, Australia, working for Charles Sturt University as a Senior Learning Resource Officer. His hobbies include a love for collecting mechanical pencils and designing boardgames .
Contact link h2
Contact here for business inquiries and commission work:
This website link h2
I updated albarkeo.com in 2025 as a project to help highlight and showcase (mostly) personal works I have completed during my career.
The website is created using the static site generator HUGO and uses the Polyrhythmic template by Wonyoung Jang - https://wonyoungjang.org/ so huge thank you to Wonyoung for distributing this under the Creative Commons license.
From here I have tacked on a bunch of custom CSS and some basic JS to change how the front end looks, particularly for image galleries.
The template formed a base on which I could add an archival gallery of my work that had originally been held on a Wordpress site.
For those interested about the weeds, each artwork has its own metadata index.md page nestled inside the folder structure of the site, so it looks something like this:
content > gallery > category > item > metadata and file.
The metadata page contains information in the frontmatter of the page:
---
title: "Kookie"
year: 2017
description: "A watercolour illustration of a kookaburra completed in 2017 for Inktober"
artist: "Alex Barnes-Keoghan"
tags:
- traditional
- kookaburra
- watercolour
- kaleidoscope
- bird
categories:
- Illustration
location: Newcastle, Australia
layout: showcase
---
So from here I can add or remove whichever data I like, pulling images back to draft if I’m no longer happy with them.
Was it a bit tedious to set up? You betcha. But is it super versatile now thanks to HUGOs templating? Absolutely.