Illustrating moral panic

Justice in a time of moral panic is a collection of essays by lawyers, academics and journalists.

Most of the illustrations in it are by me.

I gave the art director components which he assembled on the page.

I started by wanting to draw a twitter storm - a furious flock of twitter logos. Nope, said a copyright lawyer.

'I want you to imagine you're being attacked by birds,' I said to friends and life-class models who crossed my path, and drew them with tufts of sheep's wool dipped in ink. One day I forgot to bring wool and improvised with Andrex which worked just as well.

Doing proper botanical drawing would kill me. These are stylised leaves from a castor-oil plant, to illustrate a story about ricin.

The most co-operative model is yourself...

...although if I'd realised that the hands would be used so prolifically I would have grabbed some big gnarly male hands to balance my small one.

A selection of inked lines came in useful for layout purposes.

The drawings below were rejected as too esoteric for the brief. The subjects for them were reactions to Irish accents, historic child sexual abuse, rape myths and terrorism. I blog about them here.

Apollo and Daphne, Piero Del Pollaiuolo c1470-80, National Gallery

Justice in a time of moral panic is the theme of the first issue of Proof magazine, edited by Jon Robins and Brian Thornton and designed by Andrew Stocks (£15, The Justice Gap).

John Robins is a freelance journalist. He has written several books and runs The Justice Gap.

Andrew Stocks is a freelance designer and an art director at The Guardian.

Brian Thornton is a senior lecturer in Winchester University’s journalism department and commissioning editor on The Justice Gap.