The weather is coming in off the sea with rain gently splattering the skylight windows over Paul Blow’s loft studio in Bridport, a historic market town in Dorset on England’s south coast. On one table, paints and brushes are neatly arranged, but they’re not Paul’s—they belong to his wife, Suzanna Hubbard, who’s also an illustrator and shares his studio space. On the desk opposite sits a beast of an iMac and the Wacom pad Blow uses to digitally paint illustrations for some of the world’s best-known newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and corporations. In a career going back to 1996, he has become one of Britain’s most awarded illustrators.

It’s a Thursday morning—not a Wednesday, because that’s “the Economist day” when Blow paints his weekly piece for the magazine’s Bartleby column, written by Andrew Palmer, a regular he’s had for the last six years. Named after Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, the column deals with issues in corporate life, business and management, often tying in world events.

“For a freelancer to do a regular job for that amount of time with the same column is a rarity in my experience,” says Blow. “It’s in print and appears on the web and on social media, so it does have quite high exposure. But the illustration is not much bigger than a postage stamp, so the Economist wants something that has a visual hook every time. I think I’ve brought in a comic, kind of tongue-in-cheek angle to it that makes it more consumable. Now, I’ve discovered that it is one of the most popular columns in the magazine and online, so I’m just like, ‘Wow! Amazing!’”

The long tenure means that Blow can approach each week’s article intuitively. As the copy arrives, he can discuss it with the editor and writer freely and openly and usually responds with one idea rather than four or five, because they trust his judgement. To keep on track, he intuits each concept himself.

“When you’re a creator, you think: ‘This is my idea. I’m really impassioned by it. This is how I see it, and this is how I want it to work,’” he explains. “But you’ve really got to think, ‘Are the editor, the writer and the reader going to see my idea?’ As an illustrator, you have to step outside yourself and look back at it.”

According to his agent Dario Fisher at London-based agency Handsome Frank, Blow’s clients appreciate his ability to find the deeper meaning or twist in a project. “His work has a strong storytelling quality and emotional depth that adds a lot of narrative power, which is really valuable in publishing and editorial where it’s all about visual storytelling,” Fisher says. “It’s full of personality, too—sometimes dark but often humorous—which gives it a very human sense of authenticity.”

On a bank of tables in the middle of the studio, some of Blow’s printed work is on display: book jackets, magazine covers, broadsheet newspapers and album covers—illuminated in natural light, which streams in through the Velux windows despite the clouds above. A stripped hardwood floor, clean white walls and some tasteful mid-century seating give the space a neat and tidy feel.

Soon, these tables will be rented by other creatives—a writer and a photographer, perhaps—who will hopefully bring fresh ideas, perspectives and conversation to the space. “It’s great to have other people around just to talk to because being an illustrator can be an isolating, very solitary existence, and I don’t think as humans we can survive like that,” Blow says. “Perhaps some people can, but I think we need communication and social interaction with others.”

However, the studio’s neat new finish conceals a harrowing secret. In July 2018, the entire Edwards Tower Building—a converted 1915 workshop that once made sails and nets for fishing vessels—was engulfed in flames. Blow and Hubbard had recently moved to their unit from another part of the building and had just completed the studio décor. They were out one hot Saturday when they received the call and rushed back to Bridport.

“It was traumatic,” Blow explains. “Even now the smell of smoke triggers me. They said the heat got up to 600 or 700 degrees Celsius in the hottest part of the fire. I’ve got a keyboard, which [was] on my desk, that I’m going to get framed and preserved for posterity.”

Throughout the studio complex, painters, sculptors, designers, printers, ceramicists and many others lost all their work. Though Blow’s keyboard survived—albeit melted—his printed works, paints and reference materials were destroyed. Anything that didn’t burn was ruined by smoke and water damage. And the one day he didn’t take his external hard drive home after work was the day before the fire struck.

After five years working first in his son’s bedroom, then in a woodworking workshop, then a rundown office near the police station, Blow and Hubbard finally returned to their studio in 2023 to try and put the trauma behind them. “It’s changed, it’s new, it’s ours, it’s going to be bigger and better,” he says.

Having seen fire and thousands of gallons of water destroy his studio, Blow isn’t particularly phased by the changing landscape in the world of illustration. AI puzzles him, but he believes human idiosyncrasy and a sense of feeling will always fuel original work. Social media saturation is a bigger issue. He recognizes how difficult it is for new illustrators to stand out from the crowd, which brings an additional need to create videos, animations, newsletters and blogs to promote their work. The problem is: Does the work itself then suffer?

And when commissions are scarce, there is always the temptation to do something else so that when new jobs do come in, they are turned away. It’s a vicious circle Blow has battled with in the past. When he first arrived in Bridport in 2004, his briefs suddenly dried up, so he and Hubbard shared a parttime teaching role at the Arts University Bournemouth. For five years, Blow split his time between teaching and client work.

“I know there are people who can do that, but I’ve often found that lecturers would end up focusing on the teaching and would be unable to illustrate,” he says. “Their work would fall off, and I would think, ‘I didn’t study illustration and do all this work to become a lecturer.’ So, I made the conscious decision to just end teaching and focus on my work because I could see it—the thin end of the wedge.”

Adversity feeds creativity, and it was during this lean spell that Blow created one of his career-defining works. After a year in the wilderness, he received a brief from the Guardian to illustrate a piece about a woman whose relationship with her mother had become so toxic that it couldn’t go on. “It was a really powerful piece, really emotive to me as a creative—one of those jobs where it was just like, ‘I’ve got to put everything into this job because this is my make or break. I just have to do something good,’” he says.

A portrait of a woman who looks sad and worn out with montage elements to give the feel of an old photo album, Blow’s piece hit the mark not just with his art director at the newspaper but with the industry at large. In 2005, his artwork won gold in editorial at the Association of Illustrators’s annual awards in London and was printed in the Images annual.

“That was definitely a pivotal piece and made my stake in the world of illustration and editorial,” Blow says. “It marked for me a turning point that I could be a voice to rely on for editorial work and really turned my career around.”

Though he works for a wide variety of clients, editorial and publishing projects are where Blow is at his happiest, and his process seems to suit work where tone, nuance and narrative come to the fore. He builds the composition of an image in black and white—all tonal, no colors—to set the atmosphere. After the client tweaks the rough, he introduces a palette, which is the area he struggles with most. Even though clients say his color sense is spot on, it’s something he labors over, testing different colorways with the tonal values in the image and sometimes conferring with Suzanna until the palette clicks into place.

“Editorial presents me with subjects that I wouldn’t necessarily go and pursue myself,” says Blow. “Each week, it’s a healthy mix: How can I interpret string theory or the narratives of Edgar Allen Poe or the challenges of anti-Semitism on campuses? I love the high turnover, that high energy, that excitement challenging me each week, and that’s why I’m an illustrator. That’s the essence.”

Doing very little self-initiated work, Blow introduces personal elements to his commercial projects, and his clients allow him the flexibility to do so. Browse his portfolio and one motif you’ll notice is houses and architecture. They appear almost like characters in his images, but the reason for this is quite prosaic.

“We did a self-build house ten years ago, so I’m intrinsically involved,” he says. “I know how everything’s constructed—windowsills, reveals, and the fundamentals of roofs and pitches. It’s as simple as that. I’m really drawn to buildings and architecture, old and new.”

He loves being in nature, going hiking with his family, and discovering the hidden places of Dorset and Devon. In his work, he loves to paint trees, using dry, scratchy brush strokes to evoke the textures of the bark and leaves. “Trees are so much more forgiving than buildings, faces and hands,” Blow says. “What I love doing is inventing trees—structuring and growing the tree myself. I love getting into that zone where your brain switches to a different way of thinking and you become one with the paintbrush, effectively. I can go for hours painting rocks, trees, flowers, grass and landscapes.”

One day, says Blow, perhaps when he retires, he’ll take things further by learning to paint with oils. However, with his studio revamped and all his enthusiasm focused on the rich variety of work in front of him, that day seems a long way off. ca