How Abbey Lossing Uses Cubism to Build Depth Without Shading: A Look at Today’s NYT Skincare Quiz

Abbey Lossing’s lede illustration for today’s New York Times Well quiz, “Skin Care 101,” tucks a small cubist trick into the composition. The woman’s glasses show a full circular lens on one side and a thin profile on the other, a simple move that creates dimension in her face. It’s one of several decisions in the image that communicate structurally rather than through shading. She peers out from behind a wooden shelving grid, her hand reaching up through the lower shelf to lift a small jar from the row below. Bottles fill every compartment and even cross in front of her face, but the grid keeps everything organized, her gesture is calm and deliberate. The visual thesis is simple. A well-stocked shelf isn’t the problem. Knowing what to reach for is the whole point. The same logic governs the rest of the execution. Lossing works in completely flat color and yet the image reads as deep and three-dimensional. Another trick is in the linework. Her lines are drawn in the same warm cream as the background, so they register as clean seams between color fields rather than as drawn contours. The only dark lines in the piece sit on the hands, which pulls your eye straight to the gesture of choosing a product. A palette of coral, royal blue, mint, chartreuse, lavender and soft pink is tightly coordinated so dozens of bottles read as one unified image. “Skin Care 101: Quiz Yourself on the Basics” was published in The New York Times Well section on April 29, 2026. Illustration by Abbey Lossing.

How do you illustrate an adult child living at home?

That was the brief Salini Perera faced for Diana Ballon’s parenting feature in The Globe and Mail this month and her answer is disarmingly simple. Perera picked the easy evening over the difficult conversation, and trusted readers to understand why. Three smiling faces gathered around a board game, takeout containers stacked in the background, a contented cat draped across a lap. This is the version of intergenerational living the article suggests is possible and Perera makes it look like somewhere you’d want to be. Perera builds the scene in a grainy, hand-textured style that feels like a memory, with a warm ochre-and-olive palette that softens every edge. Her line work is loose but confident and small touches like the spinner wheel and the cat sprawled across a lap give the picture a lived-in specificity. “Beyond the basement: A parent’s guide to (happily) living with adult children” was published in The Globe and Mail on April 23, 2026. Illustration by Salini Perera.

Adrián Astorgano’s Illustration for The Washington Post Uses Scale Inversion to Elevate Three Generations of Chefs

The Washington Post commissioned Spain-based illustrator Adrián Astorgano to show what’s at stake in an op-ed by Colorado House majority leader Monica Duran. She made the case for her state’s Tamale Act, which is a bill that would let home cooks legally sell temperature-controlled foods like tamales. Astorgano’s central move is a scale inversion. He stacks tamales into a towering mountain and plants three generations of women on top. The tamales are both the heroic foundation lifting these cooks into the sky and the regulatory mountain the bill is trying to clear. The color palette pushes the idea further. The woman in front is rendered in full, warm color. Behind her, the grandmother and mother wash into a cool blue monochrome, almost dissolving into the sky. Hands resting on shoulders, suggesting one generation passing the tradition forward. The foreground pose is where it gets really smart. Her hand shields her brow, her gaze set on the horizon. That’s classic American pioneer iconography, and Astorgano uses it to reframe who gets to stand in that role. A grainy, silkscreen-textured finish keeps the whole piece warm and tactile. “My grandmother sold homemade tamales. Today’s rules wouldn’t allow that.” was published in The Washington Post op-ed section on April 22, 2026. Illustration by Adrián Astorgano.

Iain Macarthur Turns a Silicon Valley Feud Into an Illustrated Medieval Tapestry for WIRED Magazine

How a visual language inspired by a tapestry from 1070 captures a 2026 story about encryption keys

WIRED’s Big Story this week is a long profile about the bitter split between two developers behind GrapheneOS and its predecessor CopperheadOS. The feature illustration, by London-based Iain Macarthur, does not look like a feature illustration about a privacy-focused mobile OS. Two mounted knights clash in the center of a horizontal frieze, one on a black horse with a dollar-sign shield, the other on a white horse bearing a shield with a large black keyhole. A body lies face down between them. Two castles burn at either edge of the scene. Archers in the corners are loosing arrows at both combatants. The whole scene is contained inside a red-and-black heraldic border.

Paige Stampatori Turns a Near Miss Into a W for NPR

For NPR’s Living Better series this month, illustrator Paige Stampatori solves a tricky editorial brief with a subtle visual pun. Michaeleen Doucleff’s article describes four design tricks social media borrowed from video slot machines. The most important is “teasing”, where the app gives you almost what you want, then dangles the rest a few clicks away. Stampatori captures that idea by putting a slot machine into a child’s hands. Two cherries and a lemon. Not quite a payout, but almost one. The screen is the only light source in the picture, throwing warm glow onto the girl’s cheek and fingertips while the background falls into a deep teal. The wide eye and slightly parted lips read as the trance Doucleff writes about. Textures stay loose and painterly throughout, with visible grain which keeps the image feeling alive.

Tom Haugomat Uses Your Brain to Fill in the Blanks

Only two airplanes appear in the Paris illustrator’s new piece for Robb Report. But somehow you know that the sky is full of them.

The article this image accompanies is about how private aviation firms handle the air traffic-jam conditions at marquee sporting events. Last year’s Masters brought more than 2,050 business aircraft into the region. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, which kicks off June 11 across sixteen host cities in three countries, is shaping up to be one of the busiest events in private-aviation history. Tom Haugomat’s job was to illustrate that. His solution is to draw almost none of it.