Do More With Less

Everything in the world seems terrible right now and I don’t think I’m alone in finding it increasingly overwhelming. So, while I’m working on my mini-series of newsletters about how our Fascist Tech Broligarch Dystopia can be understood and resisted by revisiting 90s Cyber Thrillers (see Part One here), I thought I might distract myself and write something quick and easy about my recent illustration work.

Doing anything even vaguely self-promotional or self-reflective in 2025 makes me immediately think of this meme:

But, y’know, we still need to keep making art, earning money, and generally getting on with it, right?

When I’m not worrying about the fall of democracy, making comics or illustrating and writing these newsletters, I make the majority of my money from being a jobbing illustrator. I don’t generally talk about that work here. I may sometimes share something on Instagram. But more often, I’ll quietly add the work to my online portfolio. So I thought it might be nice to put some of my favourite work from the past year in one place.

Are you an Art Director?

It’s worth mentioning up top here that, personally speaking, I’m finding illustration work is drying up lately. This is no doubt due to a myriad of factors: a perennially shrinking media landscape, fewer publications that use editorial illustrations, smaller budgets and an industry-wide need to “do more with less”… All of which, with the rise of AI art and a completely atomised social media ecosystem - is making it increasingly difficult (again, speaking for myself here) to make a freelance illustration career as sustainable as it once was.

So: if you’re a commissioning editor or art director reading this - or, if you’re neither of those things but want to commission me for a comic or illustration project - then get in touch! If none of that applies to you but you like my work/this newsletter - you’d be doing me a huge favour by recommending this or my portfolio to your friends or sharing my work on social media.

It feels strange/vulnerable to be so transparent about my current illustration dry spell, but I think it’s a good thing to be open about these things. It’s a tough time for creative people right now - with arts funding cuts and the threat of AI. But it’s a tricky time for everyone. I wonder how many of us are suffering in silence. We should all be honest about when we’re struggling, I think.

Now, with all that out of the way, let’s get to the pretty pictures!

My most recent illustration. A piece for the Little White Lies In Heaven Everything Is Fine David Lynch tribute. A series of 14 illustrated essays about Lynch’s filmography. This was a dream commission. I’ve always been a huge Lynch fan and his work has been on my mind a lot lately for a number of reasons. His LA Trilogy is especially relevant to me right now since my next graphic novel is set in LA, so I’ve been watching a lot of Los Angeles Playing Itself in films. Despite my love of the whole trilogy, Lost Highway has always been my favourite. That might just be because it was one of my first introductions to Lynch. It might be because of the industrial goth soundtrack (90s era David Bowie! Smashing Pumpkins! NIN! Trent Reznor!) It’s a scrappy, messy and nasty film - and that scene still creeps me out. It was a real pleasure to draw this for Sophie Monks Kaufman’s excellent piece about the film.

Little White Lies was an important part of my 2024. I was lucky enough to be asked to illustrate the cover for their June/July issue. The featured film was Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is composed of three distinct short stories using the same cast. The brief was to try and fit as many of these characters on the cover in a semi-homage to Daniel Clowes’ illustrated poster for Happiness. A film and an artist that I felt immediately intimidated to be compared to. That said, I’m still really pleased with how it turned out. I’m no Clowes, but I think this one of my better illustrations.

Sidenote: In order for me to get a feel for the film, an advance screening was arranged for me at my local cinema. It was just me and a security guard in the screening. Very exciting. The security guard, at the end of the film, accused me of wearing glasses with a camera in. I wish I had been because trying to remember all the costume designs from my crude mid-film sketches wasn’t easy.

Getting the likenesses right was a challenge too (especially Jesse Plemons whose face seems to morph with every role). I spoke about that in this Under The Cover interview where you can see some early roughs and find out more about my process.

And here’s a quick animated gif of it:

Despite being a professional illustrator for about fifteen years, I’d never illustrated a major cover like this before. It was a huge honour.

As regular readers of this newsletter will know - I love watching and writing about movies. Almost as much as I love drawing them. So it was incredibly exciting when Anna Bogutskaya - film critic, author and host of The Final Girls podcast (among many others) - asked me to be the illustrator of her Admit One substack.

Here are some of my favourite illustrations from that newsletter. If you’d like to see all my Admit One illustrations, they are collected on my portfolio site here.

Some of my favourite film illustrations from last year were for my own newsletter. It was a fun way to experiment and try out new techniques. A lot of them found their way into my commissioned illustration work.

I was in the middle of writing a piece about my weird obsession with Extremely Mid Shark Films and using it as an excuse to write about my unending love of an obscure film from the 1970s called Jaws, when I caught sight of myself and realised no-one needs that. BUT I was really happy with these two illustrations I did for it (especially the one of Mayor Larry Vaughn - everyone’s favourite metaphor for institutional negligence). So here they are:

Even though I find likenesses hard to get right, I really enjoyed my profile illustration commissions in 2024. Especially these two from Current Affairs:

You can read the Michael Moore piece here, and the Lula piece here.

A big test of my likeness skills: I drew about 20 different chefs for a big feature in Forbes Tapas Magazine. I thought I’d throw a couple in here:

Finally, this MIT Technology Review piece about whether calling us “users” of technology is accurate anymore is the kind of editorial illustration work I’d like to do more of. I was really happy with how the art came together on this one. The piece can be read here.

Digital Nomadism*

Part of a freelance illustrators’ job is to get your work seen by the people who might want to hire you. When it comes to getting my work seen by as many people as possible, I’ve not done myself any favours by deleting my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Once upon a time those places were excellent ways to have my work discovered by commissioners and I have countless examples of times a lucky RT of my art led to some work. But, even if I didn’t want to leave those places from a moral standpoint, their constantly shifting algorithmic goalposts had already made it near impossible to get people to see my posts anyway. I’m still on Instagram for now, but expect to delete that soon.

I understand there is debate over the usefulness (or lack thereof) of leaving these platforms. There are completely valid arguments that we shouldn’t cede ground to the fascists, grifters, and tech bro Salacious B. Crumbs. But I would much rather remove myself from the Technofeudalist model of providing free content to digital landowners who are incentivised to actually make the user experience increasingly more infuriating (for more on this, see Ed Zitron’s excellent newsletter about The Rot Economy).

You can currently find me on Bluesky. That may one day meet the same fate as all these other platforms. I think we should expect that. Never trust these tech companies. Not for one second. I think we should think of ourselves as Digital Nomads - never beholden to any walled garden for too long. Always ready to delete our accounts and move on to the next place. Knowing that we’ll find our crowd again.

None of these social media companies are worth a penny without us engaging with them. I think we need to remind them of that. Chip away at their bottom line. Leave.

So, for now, please follow me on Bluesky here. And if you’re reading this newsletter but aren’t subscribed, please sign up using the button below. The nice thing about this is, if I abandon Substack (and I appreciate I should), I can export my subscriber list to a better mailing list provider and not lose you all during the move.

* I’m aware Digital Nomad is already a term that’s used to describe, essentially, working from your laptop. But that’s just Remote Working. I think this is a much better use of the term.

Catching Up

• This is probably as close as I’m going to get to doing a VERY belated 2024 retrospective. But, if you’re interested, here’s a playlist I made of my favourite music from last year.

• I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in the newsletter yet: Introduction to Charts - the poem comic that Chrissy Williams and I made last year - won a Selkie Award in December! We won Best Narrative which felt very validating. We worked hard to make sure that there was a narrative throughline to the comic which could have easily felt abstract and obtuse. Massive thanks to the judges and organisers. It’s exciting to have an awards organisation that highlights Scottish creators and a huge honour to be one of the winners last year.

  

  I shut my online shop after Christmas (I plan to only open it at certain points throughout the year). But it is now open if you want to pick up a copy of Charts. There are only two left of the initial printrun but I’m planning on a reprint sometime this year. Chrissy and I are also thinking about doing a collection of our collaborations at some point. In the meantime, I’ve added some digital PDFs to the shop of things that are sold out or close to selling out.

• I’ve also added a t-shirt to the shop! Last year I learned how to Gocco print (a more eco-friendly version of screen printing from the makers of Risograph machines), and I made a very small run of Billy Loomis & Stu Macher tees. They are all hand-printed by me on cream coloured organic ringspun cotton tees. Get one here. Because I went with a two colour design, I didn’t manage to print many tees in my session so there are only about 3 of each size (S, M, L, XL) available. I might try and do another session though, so if you’d like one in a particular size, get in touch!

  

  

  

• My comic about Palestinian athletes at the Paris Olympics was added to the important and essential resource of Cartoonists For Palestine. In a frankly astonishingly tight timeframe, the editorial team were able to pull together these comics into a beautiful book which you can buy here. It is 250 pages with 60 artists’ work (including mine). All proceeds go to MAP, ANERA and PCRF. If the postage costs are too much you can download a PDF of it and donate to those organisations directly. More info here. And here’s a review. Translations are on their way too.

  

• Phew! I think that’s everything for now. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. Next up: Part 2 of my Cyber Thriller mini-series.