Abbey Lossing's comedic and expressive tightly packed illustrations

Date
18 August 2016

Abbey Lossing is a Brooklyn-based illustrator who currently works as a staff illustrator and animator at Vice News. Noted for expressive human faces and postures, capturing a range of comedic life instances, she continues to take on a number of freelance commissions from other high-profile clients likes The New York Times, Variety, and Buzzfeed.

Recent illustrations for Buzzfeed, where she previously worked as a junior art director, have seen her collate faces en masse. She packs their grimaces into frame tightly, heightening the individual comedy of their contorted, caricatured faces. She calls them, “doodles that got out of control.”

Another depicts a variety of sleeping positions and habits, piling and packing the bodies into a pattern-like quilt, succinctly conveying the article’s narrative thrust.

She repeated this style most recently for a business feature in The New York Times, depicting the hoi polloi of the workforce hunched over their desks despondently. A single worker breaks this pattern, more vibrantly coloured and loudly asking a question demonstrating the article’s key thesis: The Power of “Why?”

Abbey Lossing captures something special in her figures, in their simultaneous humour and insight they reveal something very human at their heart. Her gifs in particular, demonstrate this: a lady dancing next to a sneeringly unimpressed cat, and a girl avoiding her friends, work and exercise for a day with the internet and taking selfies with her cat. They are disconcertingly relatable.

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Abbey Lossing: Face Pattern, for Buzzfeed

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Abbey Lossing: The Power of Why, for The New York Times

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Abbey Lossing: Sleep Patten, for Buzzfeed

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Abbey Lossing: Summer Pattern

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Abbey Lossing: Custome Party

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Abbey Lossing: Diversity at Buzzfeed, for Buzzfeed

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Abbey Lossing: Gnaw On This, personal branding

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Abbey Lossing: All in a Day’s Work

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About the Author

Jamie Green

Jamie joined It’s Nice That back in May 2016 as an editorial assistant. And, after a seven-year sojourn away planning advertising campaigns for the likes of The LEGO Group and Converse, he came back to look after New Business & Partnerships here at It’s Nice That until September 2024.

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