Sharing a cigarette or two with Jessica Hayworth from Angry Comics
By James Cowan
1) As an illustrator
how does one go from doing small 300 dollar commissions to doing bigger and
better commissions?
I still do 300 dollar
commissions but a lot of the time, I sort of tweaked it to my own rules. For
example, I have been doing a lot of portraiture lately, but the rules are you
don’t get to pick what I do to your face. I found out that the people that are
really into that are willing to pay for it, those are like the long time
followers. Those small commissions are still really important, and the big ones
come by word of mouth as well but the small ones help, it’s really hard to go
from 300 dollar commissions to the larger ones but it happens.
2) So a while ago, my
stats prof and I were doing the rough math in a class I had and we figured out that
making it as an artist who strictly lives on their commissions is almost akin,
or worse odds than making it to the NBA. I’ve found that some are the gigs come
from sources that are unpalatable as well, but they pay the rent, where do your
more routine commissions come from?
Yes, for sure a lot
of the smaller gigs just result from me getting on Twitter and saying I have so
many of these commission spots open or this many portraiture openings or very,
very specific tattoo design works, also anytime someone throws me a poster I’d
love to do it because I’ve been there consistently building that audience for
eight or nine years, so by time I ask that there are people that are genuinely
interested in it.
3) I’ve noticed a
great intuitive and subtle depth in your work, do you find that social media
gives viewers the ability to revisit your work and explore it, the construction
of it, more than an event, or say even a gallery setting?
I have had multiple
messages from total strangers, over the course of many years, who have said
that they were straight up told me that they were considering killing
themselves and something that I made helped them not do it. I think it (social
media) is a much more private and personal platform, sort of you can access it
every time, anytime type of thing, (heavy sigh)… when I put out stuff on social
media anyone who wants to look at they can, it’s like it becomes their own
personal art, there’s a weird sense of pride in saying I follow so and so…
4) Do you find that
you able to tailor your impact when it comes to your illustrations or are you
happier with the impacts you didn’t expect?
The impact I didn’t
expect, like someone who says something about killing themselves, are always in
the realm of surprise, I mean geez what do you say to somebody like that, there
is no playbook for that, it’s wild. So before I started to do commissions I’d
do endless tattoo designs and people would get my work tattooed on them and I
was like DAMN. (chuckles)
5) …with the density
of your work, do you feel it’s vital to share your process as well as your art?
Actually this is one
of the main critiques I would receive in school was that there is a really fine
line between too little and too much information when it comes to interpreting
the things that I am doing, I’ll use an example, I did a short comic that used
and was based on the Canadian Broadcasting Network’s subtitles guide and they
have really strict rules on how the subtitles work and the way the symbols they
use are laid out actually means a lot. So like if you have two greater than or
less than signs around text it means that there are two people talking off
screen, and if it’s indented to one side it means that the person is speaking
on this side, or if there indented on the other, it’s that side and if you have
three of the symbols that’s two people speaking off screen together. And so I
had the written component written like subtitles and arranged if two people
were talking to either side of the frame as if the scene extended past the
frame, and now, that information, I am not so sure how important it is to the
raw content of the piece.
