The Low-Carb Debate Gets a Colorful Treatment from Hayley Watson

Hayley Watson’s illustration for the New York Times Well section is a dense, all-over composition of fruits, vegetables, and grains rendered in bold outlines and flat, saturated color. Just food, floating and abundant, filling every inch of the frame. It looks like something you’d want to eat, or, maybe even, play with.

The piece accompanies “Why Many Doctors Don’t Like Low-Carb Diets” by Amanda Schupak, which examines the growing consensus among nutrition experts that demonizing all carbohydrates misses the point. Whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables are essential for long-term health regardless of short-term weight-loss trends. Watson’s illustration doesn’t engage with the debate. It simply presents the carbohydrates themselves as beautiful and fun.

The visual language here owes a clear debt to 1970s poster art and screen printing — the heavy outlines, the limited but punchy palette, the way forms overlap and crowd the picture plane without hierarchy. Watson trained in fine art and printmaking before moving to digital tools, and she’s described her process as using that earlier technical training to recreate what she calls an “analogue, ‘lived-in’ and distinctly human-made feel.” You can see it in the slight texture of the color fills and the confident, slightly imperfect line weight. These details signal a hand behind the image at a moment when that signal matters more than ever.

Watson is a Scottish illustrator currently based in Sydney, working internationally across editorial and advertising. Her client list includes The Guardian, and the NYT commission represents a significant step. “Hey my work is in The New York Times! For real!” she wrote on Instagram.

That candor is worth noting. The path from printmaking training to a full-page illustration in the Times isn’t linear, and Watson has been open about the precariousness of building an illustration career. In that context, the illustration’s exuberance reads as the work of someone who got the call and put everything into it.