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.