Becky Barnicoat has created drawings for many well-known places, including The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, New Statesman, Grazia, Netflix, Private Eye, The Stool Pigeon, and Five Dials. She has also done illustrations for the books Holding the Baby by Nell Frizzell and 101 Tiny Changes To Brighten Your World by Ailbhe Malone.
Becky Barnicoat has always loved drawing and started creating cartoons when she was young. Becky even did a school project in comic book form about her future career, but her teachers didn’t appreciate it and gave her a low grade. She thinks many people don’t understand that cartoons can be serious art. “I wish I could have shown them Maus so they could see how wrong they were, but I didn’t know it existed back then."
Becky gets her inspiration from people and their faces. She enjoys drawing faces and caricatures, especially those that have unique or odd features. She recalls drawing a caricature of one of her teachers who looked a bit like a guinea pig. Even though the teacher wasn’t one of the bad ones, she felt awful when the teacher saw the drawing and was hurt by it. "I love weird faces so much and sometimes I see people on the street and their faces are just bizarre. The odder the shape the better it is."
When it comes to her art, Becky mostly draws from her imagination. She finds it fun to create different faces without needing references. She mainly uses pen and ink for her drawings and enjoys experimenting with other mediums like watercolors.
