I am proudly an agricultural scientist and illustrator

My name is Willeke de Bruin, founder of Veza and the hand behind every piece of work on this site. I hold a PhD in Plant Pathology and a Diploma in Visual Communication, and for most of my career I kept the two on separate shelves of my bookcase. Veza is what happened when I finally found my "happy place", at the intersection of both.

I grew up in KwaZulu-Natal, the daughter of Dutch parents, in a home where Zulu culture was part of everyday life. Veza is the isiZulu word for "to reveal", and I cannot think of a better word for what I do. As a child I was forever investigating and probing, then sketching what I found, curious about how nature worked and looking for the patterns in it. That has remained unchanged. An illustration takes something hidden and brings it into the open, where people see, understand and act on it.

Bookshelves with art, design, psychology, and educational books, and a potted plant on the right side.
A girl sitting on a garden chair reading a book next to a lying dog in a yard with trees and bushes, black-and-white photo.

Twenty years in fresh produce

I was fortunate to have an exciting Masters project tracking fruit from farms in the Free State to Rotterdam port and retailers abroad. That project sparked my interest in how value chains work and why hygiene matters at every step along the way.

I have inspected export fruit as a lead auditor for the PPECB, South Africa's statutory inspection body for perishable exports; completed a PhD on how an industrial pollutant affects lettuce; managed food safety and quality in fresh produce factories; run research projects for local and international programmes; and taught and researched plant pathology at the University of Pretoria.

Along the way I learned that the same finding has to be explained three different ways, depending on whether the person in front of me is a grower, a factory manager or a peer reviewer. That habit of translating is what Veza excels in.

Two women standing in front of a large ship with painted red, yellow, and white design and the word "Dole" on it.

Explaining science was always my job

Long before Veza was a business, I was part of a team revealing science to farmers across Africa through a mobile laboratory. This work earned the International Society for Plant Pathology's Challenge Award. By collaborating with actors, I have used theatre to teach good agricultural and hygiene practices to smallholder farmers and factory workers, written for popular papers, spoken on radio, and co-developed three online food safety courses. I am also a co-author of several peer-reviewed papers, listed in full on my ResearchGate profile, as well as policy briefs and a number of grant proposals.

Rustic wooden gate across a dirt path with signs hanging from the top rail, surrounded by trees and grassy land under a partly cloudy sky.
Market stand made of wooden pallets with produce including apples, carrots, lettuce, and cabbage, under a shadecloth in an outdoor setting.

Research comes first. If I am illustrating a disease cycle, I have read the papers. If I am designing a food safety guideline, I know the standard it comes from, because I have audited against it. This cycle of learning something properly and then turning it into a picture is what gives me energy.

Most of my work starts by hand, in soft pastel or pencil, and is finished digitally. Drawing by hand slows me down and makes me look properly at a fungal lesion or the anatomy of a seed, and it produces original images, made for one audience rather than pulled from a stock library.

Pencil, then pixels

Illustration of an orange, with the image placed on white paper on a green cutting mat, along with soft pastel pencils.
A woman with blonde hair smiling while working on an illustration in her studio.

That's the story. Here is my work.

My work