Quirky Charming Hand-Drawn Ballooning Squirrels

How to be an English illustrator:

Projects are always 'jolly exciting'.

Your vocabulary is strictly controlled and in the style of Bertie Wooster. You say things like:

"the whole shebang"
"ruddy nice"
"hello kids"
"at the end of play"
"stand down"
"what ho!"

Your work is usually described as:
"...eclectic , playful, exquisite, charming, hand-drawn, quirky, enchanting, mysterious".

You are worried about 'selling out' - but you'd like to sell some of your work to 'pay the bills'. You probably live in a grisly damp flat in one of Broken Britain's most exciting and dirty urban playgrounds. But your work is more likely usually about either owls or drinking tea. Or owls who drink tea. Or balloons, or squirrels, or any animals that talk and also wear hats and drink tea. You never look out the window and draw what you see for fear of being labelled 'urban'. This would prejudice advertising agencies and mobile phone companies from using your exquisite ballooning illustrations to sell their new airtime offers.

All this is fine, but in the end we have to be careful as artists that we don't spend most of our energy building charming and dishonest aesthetics just to sell products. We live in a complex and interesting world, not always a twee and colourful one. We don't have to act like war photographers, looking for the best angle on a smoking corpse, but we need to remain honest about how we use our creativity.

Let us not become the next generation of chocolate box painters.