Chrissie Macdonald talks creative "support groups" and never giving up

From walks on Hampstead Heath and shelves bursting with books to cinema tickets and old magazines, Chrissie Macdonald takes a very analogue approach when she starts work on a new idea. Screens take a backseat as she rifles through her collections of stuff, filed in boxes alongside perhaps less useful collections including a “Keanu Reeves file,” shown in all its glory on the huge screen at this year’s Offset festival.

We’ve been long-time admirers of Chrissie’s work, whose distinctive 3D style emerged in the late 2000s, perhaps realised most obviously in her huge camping for Orange. “It can become a catch-22," she says. “You can get stuck in a loop that once you do a certain style you get commissioned for that kind of thing so it becomes cyclical.”

Her advice for getting out of a stylistic rut? Developing personal practice, outside of commissioned work. “Your personal work is a way of saying ‘Here’s something else I can do.’ That way you’re not repeating yourself too much. But if it’s a project where you get to come up with the idea, even if people are working in a similar style, everyone has their own take on how they’d approach the brief conceptually.”

To come up with said concepts, Chrissie takes a refreshingly analogue approach: it’s all about the aforementioned walks and lists and physical objects before going anywhere near a screen. And she’s not short of collected ephemera to sift through. “I’ve always been about the objects, even over sketchbooks,” she says. “I’ve kept every ticket for every exhibition I’ve been to, and every cinema ticket and magazine. Maybe it’s to do with my fear of losing my memory, but I can look back at a ticket and see where I was living and what I was doing. When I look for inspiration I go to my bookshelf of my collection of things rather than going online.”

Having seen her sketchbooks, it’s noticeable that Chrissie favours fabric swatches and paint samples over drawings, which are worked up much later. She says she’s nocturnal, working “late into the night,” but is fortunate in having an understanding partner who totally gets the quirks of being a creative. Chrissie is married to illustrator Andrew Rae, and the pair often work on desks opposite one another at their home in north London.

“Andrew works from home full-time now and although I still have a studio space, I’m working a lot from home now. We used to work in different rooms but now we’re in the same one, literally working opposite each other,” says Chrissie. “It’s like when we first started out: we had one half of a desk each in the corner of our living room. We managed to get through that, so we can get through everything.”

Chrissie and Andrew are both members of Peepshow, a multi-disciplinary collective formed by Brighton University illustration and design alumni around 15 years ago. Chrissie reckons the collective was crucial in giving the confidence and know-how to make it in the tricky path to becoming a professional creative.

“It was like having a support group. When you leave uni you’re ejected from this supportive, social thing to being on your own, so it’s like a support network to keep you going,” she says. “On a very basic level there’s strength in numbers so you can all pitch in and pay for exhibitions and feed off each other. When we were learning to use Photoshop we could ask each other how to do things, and if one person found out about a folio drop, we’d all help each other out instead of being competitive.”

So what advice would she give to people taking their first steps towards an illustration career? “Things have changed so much since we graduated, everything’s so much more instant as things are all online and so visible. We found it was hard to see what was going on without looking at a contact illustration book,” says Chrissie.

“What’s important is to stay in touch with people and keep the momentum going. It’s easy to hit reality and think ‘I can’t keep doing this. I need a job to pay the rent.’ It’s about realising it’s not going to be an instantaneous – either you’re going to become an illustrator or you’re not – thing. You need to stick with it and be imaginative about how you can create things for yourself and not rely on someone commissioning you. You can create events and exhibitions and get together with other creative people: collaboration always really helps to build something bigger than yourself.”