Abbey Lossing's comedic and expressive tightly packed illustrations

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.