This is a selection of work that I've made or the New York Times since I began working with them in 2007. Like many people, I began working on the Letters page, then moved on to Opinion and Book Review, and many of the illustrious Art directors who have passed through these sections. Working here is always a pleasure and a privilege. There are some people for whom you make your best work, and I have met a few of them at the Times. They know who I am, and hire me to make what I like. 

Here is some content from some show bibles I made with Maya Tanaka and Jax Media, and just with Jax Media (respectively). These were good ideas, so someone please reach out and give these things new life, hey?

I only wrote AND drew the first couple excerpts on here, so don’t get too excited. That said, I would like to make lots more…

Drawing for niche design firms can be so rewarding. Kate and Erin are a dream to work with, and have cheerfully paid me in BBQ and introduced me to their families. They take care to bring me work I can stand behind politically and visually. If you're in Texas, hire them. Also, you don’t have to be in Texas. They design for everyone.

This is a selection of the work I've made by the good grace and inspired spirit of Irene Gallo at TOR and tor.com. She always takes care to give me pieces about women, urban fantasy, and impossible-to-visualize metaphor. Her love of Sci Fi and Fantasy, her approach, and the fact that she's been hiring me since 2007 makes her one of my favorite Art Directors. 

I love drawing for The New Yorker, especially for fiction.

My first real job (and then at least a quarter of my income) was for a Business trade publication. I never would have guessed that my most surreal concepts would be things like metaphors for index funds, and I’m grateful for the creative opportunities the genre has given me.

I always enjoy the freedom of working with Nadxi Nieto. This short comic for Tiny Crimes is no exception. I love the idea of combining autobio and true crime as a genre. Also, I'm in very good fiction company. Here's how Catapult describes this collection of short stories:

Tiny Crimes gathers leading and emerging literary voices to tell tales of villainy and intrigue in only a few hundred words. From the most hard-boiled of noirs to the coziest of mysteries, with diminutive double crosses, miniature murders, and crimes both real and imagined, Tiny Crimes rounds up all the usual suspects, and some unusual suspects, too. With illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook and flash fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Benjamin Percy, Amelia Gray, Adam Sternbergh, Yuri Herrera, Julia Elliott, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Charles Yu, Laura van den Berg, and more, Tiny Crimes scours the underbelly of modern life to expose the criminal, the illegal, and the depraved.

I've worked with Len Small at Nautilus three times since the summer of 2013. Nautilus hires some of the more beautiful art for science that I've seen. I read it for the pictures. This piece, by Gillen D'Arcy Wood was about how the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora gave us Gothic Literature.   I redid the cover four times. 

I've worked for McSweeneys, Lucky Peach, and Grantland from 2009 on various projects. It's always a privilege. My work on Issues 42 and 44 is my favorite. Some of Issue 44's work, all black and white sketches for fiction, is pictured here. 

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Leo Jung, Creative Director at California Sunday, Inc. at a student conference about process at CCA. He asked me to illustrate this set of images to accompany Kat Southerland's performance at the recent Pop-Up Magazine event in Chicago. Her story is about a young girl from the south who moves to Chicago as a creative punk looking to find herself. She finds herself in a nightclub. She eventually moves to the east coast, experiences a few hardships, and finds herself back in Chicago, again. Thanks, Leo!
 

Cosmoramama was made for HANDS gallery in Oakland and will be open from February 2018-May 2018. Everything in the space references a single VR scene. Everything is for sale. And it turns out it might be illegal to sell any of it. IDK. You decide. Here's what we put in the fliers: 

COSMORAMARAMA is the artist's portrayal of a landscape imagined and constructed in Virtual Reality. It features a range of polished steel, bronze, silver, resin, and nylon sculptures, with delicate fabric tapestries layered over fluid steel forms, and the digital environment from whence they all were derived. The physical and virtual work together paradoxically to create an environment one can never perceive in its whole. 

Allsbrook often spends more time in a headset than she spends awake; she identifies with user interfaces.  She, and many others like her, have demonstrated art in Virtual Reality as a use case—but this is already the winter of VR. In the space of a couple of years, and several corporate reorganizations, her world has begun to disappear around her. But can it really be said to be her own world? Maybe not: according to Facebook and Google’s licensing agreements, all assets generated using their direct VR creation tools cannot be owned by their creators. 

Virtual reality was not the first product to use artistic context to create commercial value —the creator of the panorama made social, immersive tech with the express intent of charging admission. A collection of these diverse panoramic perspectives, which make up a geographically transcendent environment, is known as a Cosmorama.

Wesley Allsbrook is a commercial artist who came to the Bay Area to work for the now shuttered Oculus Story Studio, at the height of the VR boom in 2015. While at Story Studio she drew and art directed the animated VR film Dear Angelica, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, featured at the Venice Film Festival, awarded at Raindance, and nominated for an Emmy. She has made VR work for The Discovery Channel, Felix and Paul, Google, Maria Bello VR Productions, Porsche, Warner Brothers, and more. She lives in Los Angeles and works everywhere.

I've worked with the Marshall Project and Lisa Iaboni twice. Both were feature pieces, and both were collaborations with other non profit news sites. This piece, "An Unbelievable Story of Rape" written by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, made in collaboration with ProPublica, won a Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting. 

In 2015, Inigo Quilez wrote QuilI, the tool with which I drew every line in "Dear Angelica", co-written and directed with Saschka Unseld, written and developed by Angela Petrella, and made by the good people at Oculus Story Studio. Dear Angelica premiered at Sundance 2017.  

I will always draw flat, but making work in VR has changed the way I think about drawing, and has made me better. I cannot imagine not working in this way.

Tilt Brush frequently and generously employs me for small contracts. This was just a small project to see whether I could get some of my flat characters and scenes to translate into a VR context for an activation at VR LA. It works alright. Mostly I'm glad that they let me do what I like, more or less. 

This year four other illustrators and I were commissioned by Zejian Shen to illustrate a piece of the Ramayana in accordion-comic form. This work was made to accompany the Rama Epic exhibition, which will be at the Asian Art museum from October 21.  I'm white, and they let me work on this piece. Which is pretty cool. And I think it's not just cool, but okay because the Rama Epic is full of archetypes and myths that we can all relate to. The museum wants everyone to come see the show and see themselves. 

They gave me Ravana's abduction of Sita. I like seeing Ravana as a tech prince with many emoji faces. And San Francisco is a lot like Lanka. Very beautiful, and full of demons. 

Here's some art for the programs of the SF Curran's run of Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, Directed by Liesl Tommy and performed by Ayesha Jordan, Joniece Abbot-Pratt, Akosua Busia, Adeola Role, and Stacey Sergeant.  This is a play with an all-female cast about the impossible choices left to the women of Liberia during Charles Taylor's regime. Many of you will remember reading about Black Diamond in high school. This is that. My thanks to Sunra Thompson for the work and the design. I include scans here because they show off some of Sunra's context, and also how well things printed on this paper. 

But, anyway:

After the play, Greg Backstrom took me back stage to meet the cast. All had very kind things to say while I sputtered and acted like anyone who's ever met an actor. They signed my program. I most enjoyed my conversation with Akosua Busia and her daughter. We were doing the thing where you say where you're from. She's from Ghana. I told her North Carolina. She said "Oh, I know that place. Very well. I played a lot of slaves there."

Then we laughed for different but completely related reasons. 

I worked with OZY in 2015 and 2016. These were made for pieces  about modern feminism in China, and for a tech philosophy series. 

This piece was a pitch for a serialized New York bar review comic. Aside from the work on Nervosa, it was one of the first complete things I ever made with Barrie Potter. A thing happened to me where I moved to New York with my soon-to-be-boyfriend to be illustrators together. The recession had just hit. I became an illustrator, and he became a dishwasher, then a barback, then a server, and then a bartender at a place in our neighborhood: The Manhattan Inn.

He went on to train Barrie on the same track. Adam is now quite a singular bartender at one of the most well known and respected cocktail bars in Manhattan. But the years these two men spent at the Inn are ones that I will remember as some of the darkest of my adult life, and in the lives of everyone I met there. This place was a vortex of fatalistic hedonism that cheerfully drowned the talent and potential of every person working under its roof. The story of death in the service of drunk brooklynites is eternal. Alcoholic victims were an obsession of Barrie's, and what we wanted here was for our main character to be always trying to solve a mystery that he was too drunk to remember, while allowing our readers to tour new bars and retreading an exhausting social roster of usual suspects.

I'd still make it. Funnier, more stylized, but I would do it.  I pitched it to Lucky Peach, The New Yorker, The Times...  I pitched it to Vice and was roundly rejected by Nick Gazin, art director and butt blogger. His email to me began "How old are you and where did you go to school?"  

There are days when I think I should have sent him a picture of my ass instead. 

This was the first published piece that Barrie and I made together. We sold it to Irene Gallo at tor.com in 2014. It won a silver medal at the Society of Illustrators. I had always wanted to make something about the last man and woman on earth. At first he suggested that the woman be convinced that her husband was unfaithful. But we pivoted to a story about dissatisfaction and changeableness, and uncomfortable compromise in the face of inevitable, incontrovertible facts. Who would like to take a bets on whether either of us will ever be married? 

"Wide Awake" was an exploratory comic about my time living and working in magical San Francisco.  

It's best if you read it on your cell phone.

Hope you like it.

In 2012, my friends and I left ICON7 and began making image and phrase libraries that we would mash together to make stream of consciousness gag comics for a blog called "Extra Bitches". Many clients saw the link to this blog on my site and wrote to me specifically to tell me that they would not hire me, and that they found the title of my blog offensive.  I don't believe that they read the blog itself, but I could be wrong.