When it comes to Leon Edler’s illustrations, humor is to be expected. Minimalistic, bold, and quirky, his work is meant to be taken lightly. “I wanted to make stuff that made people laugh,” Edler remarked once in an interview with Sense of Creativity, Edler. “I thought that would be for TV, but I liked how immediate cartoons were. I could draw them and make my friends laugh.”
His audience, as it turns out, was much bigger than his small group of friends. Based in Brighton, Edler jokingly refers to himself as a “dirty commercial artist,” with selected clients including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, and Vanity Fair.
“I’m a comedy nerd and grew up loving everything from 50s radio comedy to modern sitcoms,” he relayed, referring to Tony Hancock, Seinfeld, and Alan Partridge as sources of inspiration for his work.
But like most creative vocations, his work requires not only intuition but mainly – practice, as Edler refined his comedic voice “I’m sure everyone is creative in some way,” he notes. “But to make good stuff, you need to spend a lot of time practicing – finding what you’re good and bad at.”
Take a look at some of his good stuff in the gallery below.
