What the Commissioned Work Looks Like
The illustration carries the same visual logic as the printed books, which is unusual in a field where commissioned work often looks nothing like an illustrator’s personal output. Flat areas of colour, clean edges, and meaning built through how things are arranged, and not through rendering or texture.
That is a screen printer’s grammar applied to a reproduction medium. It also happens to be the right grammar for newsprint, where fine tonal work disappears into the paper and a strong flat shape survives.
Subjects and Constraints
Editorial subjects are rarely pictorial. An illustrator is handed an argument about economics, employment, technology or politics and asked to make it visible. The usual solutions are metaphor and juxtaposition: two things placed together so their relationship carries the point.
One column, one idea, one deadline, and two to five flat colours to carry it.
The portfolio ran across commissioned pieces for the press, stock illustration held for reuse, and a body of work in motion and animation. A selection of the commissioned work from 2011 to 2013 was presented as the core portfolio.
Motion and Animation
Part of the output moved into animated illustration. The transition is less of a jump than it sounds for work built from flat shapes: a figure assembled from separable colour areas is already close to being rigged, because the parts are already parts. A screen printed image is literally made in layers, and layers are what an animation timeline wants.
Collage and Print
Collage runs through both the commissioned illustration and the printed books. Cutting and placing is the same operation as masking a screen — deciding where ink is allowed to reach the paper is a physical form of cutting a shape out. Working the two methods together means a composition can be tested with scissors before any emulsion is exposed.
How This Connects to the Books
The editorial work and the artists’ books are not separate careers. The illustration paid for the press and taught the discipline of making one image carry one idea; the books removed the column width and the deadline and let a sequence of images carry a longer argument. The manuals came out of the same practice from the other direction, explaining the process to people who wanted to print their own.
The Regular Columns
The illustration work that mattered most to him was the recurring commission and not the one-off. Two weekly columns are named consistently: The Independent Magazine from 2000 to 2002, and Private Lives in The Guardian’s G2 from 2007 to 2009.
A regular column changes what an illustrator can do. A single commissioned image has to carry the whole argument at once, which pushes towards the obvious. A weekly slot lets a visual language build over months, so that a device established in March can be relied on in September, and the reader does the work of recognition instead of the picture doing all of it.
The published subjects show the range that allowed. For Private Lives: dreams, sleep, identity, relationships, surveillance, a figure as a puppet on strings. For the political comment pages of The Guardian: funerals, the NHS, Tunisia. For the Times Educational Supplement: cuts, further education, the glass ceiling. For The Economist: a sick economy, the financial crisis, sole traders.
How an Illustration Was Made
The method came directly from the workshop. Images were built in layers of flat colour, usually between two and five, which is a screen printer’s constraint applied to work that would be reproduced photographically and never pulled through a mesh at all.
Working that way forces the decision early. A subject has to be resolved into a small number of separable shapes before anything is drawn in earnest, and an idea that cannot survive being reduced to four colours does not get made.
The stated aim was not to restate the text in pictures but to find a surreal equivalent for it, on the principle that an image can hold a complex proposition that a sentence has to unpack.