Satire of the process, never caricature of the person
Sleyor draws for the same reason it writes: to make a broken arrangement visible enough to argue with. That points the pencil at systems — the form nobody reads, the meeting that exists to schedule the next meeting, the rule written for a problem that stopped existing in 1994. It does not point the pencil at faces. A publication whose whole claim is that it scores its own honesty cannot spend the same week drawing a politician with a big nose.
What we draw
Processes, forms, queues, committees, and the paperwork they generate.
Buildings, machines, and institutions drawn as the machines they behave like.
Anonymous, featureless figures standing in for anybody caught inside the process.
The publication itself, including this one, when it earns it.
What we never draw
Any real, identifiable person — no likeness, no caricature, no lookalike.
Party marks, flags, election imagery, or anything that reads as a side.
Cruelty about a body, an accent, a faith, or a place someone is from.
A gag with no argument under it. If the drawing has no alternative behind it, it does not run — same rule as the copy.
The style library
5 locked
Each style is fully specified — medium, line, palette, finish — and never reworded when a plate is commissioned. That is what makes two drawings six months apart look like they came off the same press.
01
The house drawing
Made in Lustra
Drawn line, cartoon build, straight face. One pen weight with a human wobble; the frame always contains people, and every one of them is nondescript — rounded anonymous shapes, no face a reader could match to anybody. The absurdity lives in what the objects are doing, never in a mugging expression. One lime element, and it is always the thing the argument is about.
The anchor. Unless an editor asks for something else, a piece gets this. It is the look a reader should recognise from across a room.
A single-panel hand-drawn editorial cartoon in one confident dip-pen contour line of even weight with a slight natural wobble, as if inked by hand in one sitting. Cartoon construction — figures and objects simplified into clean rounded shapes with generous exaggeration of scale and mechanism, but drawn with an adult, restrained, broadsheet sensibility rather than a children's or newspaper-gag look. No cross-hatching, no rendering, no gradients, no textures; flat only. Large areas of untouched paper carrying the composition. A few soft flat warm-grey (#b9b3a1) fills used sparingly for mass and depth, and exactly one flat electric lime (#d8f250) shape placed on the single object the joke is about. Deadpan comic timing: the machine, the queue or the arrangement behaves absurdly while everything in the frame treats it as completely normal. No speech bubbles, no captions inside the frame, no labels except at most two or three words in small hand-lettered capitals on a sign or machine plate, spelled correctly. Symmetrical in its aim — nothing in the drawing indicates a political side. The scene must contain people — at least two, usually three to six — placed at ordinary human scale so the reader can see who the arrangement is happening to. Every figure is deliberately nondescript: rounded simplified heads with no rendered facial features beyond at most a dot for an eye and a plain line for a mouth, no hair styling that identifies anybody, plain unbranded everyday clothing, mixed heights and builds, backs and three-quarter views preferred over faces to camera. Nobody in the frame is a specific person, a public figure, or a lookalike, and no figure is mocked for their body. The figures behave completely normally; the absurdity belongs to the machine around them. No real or identifiable people, no public figures, no caricature of any individual, no party logos, flags, slogans or election imagery. Figures are anonymous and generic — plain silhouettes or featureless everyday people. The target is the process, never a person. Warm bone-white paper ground (#f6f4ec), warm near-black ink (#14130f), and a single electric lime accent (#d8f250) used sparingly on one element only. No other bright colour. Balanced composition with generous margins, nothing cropped at the edge. Output the finished artwork only.
02
Editorial line
Made in Lustra
One ink weight, no shading, one lime element. It should look drawn in a single sitting with a good pen.
The default. Opinion pieces, the manifesto, anything on Politics or Place.
The locked brief+−
A single-colour editorial pen-and-ink illustration in the manner of a serious broadsheet opinion page: confident continuous contour line of even weight, no cross-hatching and no tonal shading, large areas of untouched paper, one deliberate spot of flat lime colour on a single object to carry the eye. Restrained, adult, unfussy. The scene must contain people — at least two, usually three to six — placed at ordinary human scale so the reader can see who the arrangement is happening to. Every figure is deliberately nondescript: rounded simplified heads with no rendered facial features beyond at most a dot for an eye and a plain line for a mouth, no hair styling that identifies anybody, plain unbranded everyday clothing, mixed heights and builds, backs and three-quarter views preferred over faces to camera. Nobody in the frame is a specific person, a public figure, or a lookalike, and no figure is mocked for their body. The figures behave completely normally; the absurdity belongs to the machine around them. No real or identifiable people, no public figures, no caricature of any individual, no party logos, flags, slogans or election imagery. Figures are anonymous and generic — plain silhouettes or featureless everyday people. The target is the process, never a person. Warm bone-white paper ground (#f6f4ec), warm near-black ink (#14130f), and a single electric lime accent (#d8f250) used sparingly on one element only. No other bright colour. Balanced composition with generous margins, nothing cropped at the edge. Output the finished artwork only.
03
Flat panel
Made in Figura
Bold outline, flat fill, at most three panels. Dry, never gleeful.
The satire slot. Short comic beats about a process that defeats itself.
The locked brief+−
A dry newspaper comic strip of at most three equal panels with thin rule borders: bold black outlines of even weight, entirely flat colour fill with no gradients or shading, simplified geometric figures, generous empty space inside each panel, lime used only as a single flat fill. Deadpan and understated in tone, never zany, never gleeful, no speed lines, no exclamation marks. The scene must contain people — at least two, usually three to six — placed at ordinary human scale so the reader can see who the arrangement is happening to. Every figure is deliberately nondescript: rounded simplified heads with no rendered facial features beyond at most a dot for an eye and a plain line for a mouth, no hair styling that identifies anybody, plain unbranded everyday clothing, mixed heights and builds, backs and three-quarter views preferred over faces to camera. Nobody in the frame is a specific person, a public figure, or a lookalike, and no figure is mocked for their body. The figures behave completely normally; the absurdity belongs to the machine around them. No real or identifiable people, no public figures, no caricature of any individual, no party logos, flags, slogans or election imagery. Figures are anonymous and generic — plain silhouettes or featureless everyday people. The target is the process, never a person. Warm bone-white paper ground (#f6f4ec), warm near-black ink (#14130f), and a single electric lime accent (#d8f250) used sparingly on one element only. No other bright colour. Balanced composition with generous margins, nothing cropped at the edge. Output the finished artwork only.
04
Cut block
Made in Lustra
Carved marks and printed texture. It should look like it was pressed, not rendered.
Heavier pieces. Health, institutions, anything that needs weight.
The locked brief+−
A woodcut / linocut relief print on rough handmade paper: bold carved black shapes, visible gouge marks and chisel texture, high contrast with no mid-tones, slight ink over-inking at the edges and faint plate impression, one area printed as a second lime pass slightly out of register. Solemn, hand-made, physical. The scene must contain people — at least two, usually three to six — placed at ordinary human scale so the reader can see who the arrangement is happening to. Every figure is deliberately nondescript: rounded simplified heads with no rendered facial features beyond at most a dot for an eye and a plain line for a mouth, no hair styling that identifies anybody, plain unbranded everyday clothing, mixed heights and builds, backs and three-quarter views preferred over faces to camera. Nobody in the frame is a specific person, a public figure, or a lookalike, and no figure is mocked for their body. The figures behave completely normally; the absurdity belongs to the machine around them. No real or identifiable people, no public figures, no caricature of any individual, no party logos, flags, slogans or election imagery. Figures are anonymous and generic — plain silhouettes or featureless everyday people. The target is the process, never a person. Warm bone-white paper ground (#f6f4ec), warm near-black ink (#14130f), and a single electric lime accent (#d8f250) used sparingly on one element only. No other bright colour. Balanced composition with generous margins, nothing cropped at the edge. Output the finished artwork only.
05
Diagram plate
Made in Figura
Drafted like a patent figure and completely straight-faced. The joke is the diagram being accurate.
The house speciality. Absurd technical drawings of a process that does not work.
The locked brief+−
A straight-faced technical figure in the style of a patent drawing or engineering plate: fine uniform hairline black linework, exploded and sectioned views, leader lines with small numbered reference callouts, a faint construction grid, a small ruled title block in the lower right, monospaced labels set very small. Absolutely deadpan draughtsmanship — the subject is an ordinary bureaucratic process rendered with the seriousness of a machine. One flow arrow picked out in flat lime. The scene must contain people — at least two, usually three to six — placed at ordinary human scale so the reader can see who the arrangement is happening to. Every figure is deliberately nondescript: rounded simplified heads with no rendered facial features beyond at most a dot for an eye and a plain line for a mouth, no hair styling that identifies anybody, plain unbranded everyday clothing, mixed heights and builds, backs and three-quarter views preferred over faces to camera. Nobody in the frame is a specific person, a public figure, or a lookalike, and no figure is mocked for their body. The figures behave completely normally; the absurdity belongs to the machine around them. No real or identifiable people, no public figures, no caricature of any individual, no party logos, flags, slogans or election imagery. Figures are anonymous and generic — plain silhouettes or featureless everyday people. The target is the process, never a person. Warm bone-white paper ground (#f6f4ec), warm near-black ink (#14130f), and a single electric lime accent (#d8f250) used sparingly on one element only. No other bright colour. Balanced composition with generous margins, nothing cropped at the edge. Output the finished artwork only.
Exception
House portrait
Specimen — invented subject, no real person
Photographic structure, illustrated finish. Real skin and hair texture, full dimensional modelling, faithful likeness. Neutral expression, even light, identical crop and cutout for everyone on the board. Never caricature, never exaggeration, never a mood the source did not have.
Named candidates and named subjects in a comparison, where a photograph would be an argument. Every other house style forbids drawing a real, identifiable person. This one is the single exception, and it earns it by being a faithful treatment of the subject’s own official portrait rather than a drawing of an opinion about them.
ratio
4 / 5
crop
Head and shoulders, eyes on the upper third, squared to camera
expression
Neutral to faintly pleasant — as in the source portrait
light
Single soft key from the front, no rim light, no drama
ground
Flat bone-white field, no scene, no props, no setting
finish
Cut out cleanly from the ground with a soft contact shadow beneath the shoulders. Skin and hair carry real texture and dimensional modelling; the finish stays illustrative, not a retouched photograph.
Taken from the player card
Full dimensional modelling of the head — real bone structure, painted in planes.
Painted brushwork: sculpted skin tones and grouped hair shapes, never photo detail.
Clean cutout edge with a soft contact shadow, so the subject sits on the field.
Confident edges and readable structure; the render survives being enlarged.
Refused from the player card
Team-colour rim light, gradient sweeps, or any lighting that reads as a side.
Low hero angle, raised chin, or any camera position that confers stature.
Jaw hardening, slimming, de-aging, skin smoothing, or eye brightening.
Motion blur, sweat, intensity, or any borrowed athletic emotion.
Rendered from the subject's own official portrait or press-kit image. Never from a wire photo, never from a candid, never invented. The source image is named in the credit line with the render.
The locked brief+−
A digitally painted stylised portrait illustration in the style of a modern professional-sports player-card render — clearly an illustration, never a photograph. Hand-painted digital rendering with visible brush-plane shading: skin built from smooth sculpted tonal planes with crisp transitions rather than photographic pore detail, hair rendered as grouped painted strands and shapes rather than individual photographic hairs, clean confident edges, slightly heightened contrast between light and shadow planes. Faithful realistic proportion and anatomy throughout. Head and shoulders, squared to camera at eye level, eyes on the upper third, cut out cleanly on a flat bone-white field (#f6f4ec) with a soft contact shadow beneath the shoulders and no scene or props. Even soft frontal key light, no rim light, no colour gradient. Neutral to faintly pleasant expression exactly as in the source. Warm near-black (#14130f) for the deepest values and a restrained warm grey (#8d8674) for mid-tones; a single electric lime (#d8f250) permitted only as a thin ground accent, never on the face. Absolutely no caricature and no sports-marketing theatre: no exaggerated or enlarged features, no altered proportion, no added expression, no low hero angle, no raised chin, no jaw hardening, no slimming, no de-aging, no skin smoothing, no brightened eyes, no motion blur or borrowed intensity. Do not flatter and do not diminish. The render must be recognisable as the source portrait and nothing more. Output the finished portrait only.
Every plate is made in Lustra or Figura from a locked house style and moved, where it moves, by Pulsa. The look is fixed on purpose. A reader should be able to recognise a Sleyor drawing from across a room without reading the mark.