Didem Tereyagoglu
Chevron, Angola
Editorial Illustration
This watercolor illustration reimagines Chevron’s Mafumeira Centro platform—one of Angola’s most critical offshore production hubs in Block 0—through a handcrafted lens that celebrates both precision and storytelling. Located off the coast of Cabinda, the platform serves as a major contributor to Angola’s oil output, integrating production, processing, and accommodation units. Due to extreme scale and access challenges, editorial visuals for such facilities were often limited to technical blueprints or outdated photos. This illustration bridges that gap, elevating visual communication by translating complex offshore infrastructure into a layered, approachable image.
The work features detailed rig structures including the helipad, module arrangements, and equipment decks—rendered in bold lines and delicate watercolor textures. More than a static depiction, the image functions as a storytelling tool, helping global audiences grasp the complexity of deepwater operations while adding emotional and editorial value to a highly technical topic.
To humanize and visually articulate Chevron’s large-scale operations in Angola through a custom illustration that reflects both the infrastructure’s complexity and its importance to the national energy landscape—making the unseen seen.
Used as a full-page editorial highlight in The Oil & Gas Year’s Angola edition, this piece reinforced Chevron’s offshore leadership and became a central visual in both the print magazine and associated digital materials. Its success further established watercolor as a defining visual language in the publication’s approach to covering large-scale energy projects.
With limited photography access and only a few low-resolution reference shots available, the challenge was to rebuild the facility visually from fragmented resources while preserving technical credibility. The final piece reconstructed the platform’s complexity in an accurate yet artistically expressive way—showing that even the most industrial subjects could be reimagined with beauty, scale, and clarity.
