This story is part of Creative Resilience, an editorial series produced in collaboration with Squarespace.

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“I’ve always had a sense of adventure,” says Malin Lindholm. Originally from Sweden, the production designer has rarely stood still since graduating from Stockholm University in the early 1990s. Over the course of her plus 20-year career she’s hopscotched from city to city, taking time off in between jobs to quench her thirst for travelling. Indeed, when we speak to Malin, she’s en route to a friend’s house in a small village in Bulgaria for an impromptu getaway. It’s the first time she’s been able to travel for over five months, having been grounded (like the vast majority of people) due to COVID-19, and it’s plain to see she’s excited to be hitting the road again.

“I love to travel,” she explains, “and I do a lot of travelling particularly in between jobs. There was a time when I had more downtime and I was able to go away for longer, but on a film or TV series you can be working solidly for six or seven months, so it’s really important to make time to go away and switch off from everything. If I go on a regular holiday and just lie on the beach then I find it hard to disconnect. If I go a bit more off the beaten track and immerse myself in a new culture and set off on an adventure, with very little planned, then that allows me to really give my brain a rest. It can be exhausting travelling that way, but it’s more relaxing in terms of it being easier to step away from work.”

Occasionally, Malin’s wanderlust and work intersect. In 2017 she teamed up with the British-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni to make the dazzling social drama I Am Not a Witch, which was shot on location in southern Africa and went on to win the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. For Malin, who took on the role of art director, the film provided a different kind of challenge.

“It was a very organic way of working,” she recalls. “We didn’t necessarily stick to our assigned roles because we were a very small crew and we were filming in an environment where there really is no film industry; we had to work with what was there. Normally you set up an art department and work with teams who are used to their roles and come on board to meet a specific creative need. I Am Not a Witch was an exception in that sense – we had very limited resources but it was a great adventure and a very enjoyable way of working.”

Like so many creatives, Malin’s livelihood has been adversely affected by the pandemic, but crucially she’s managed to find ways to stay productive. During the early stages of lockdown – when hitting the open road had another meaning – she took to drawing the empty streets and buildings in her neighbourhood in east London. She would grab a camera and take pictures on her daily designated walk, then render the images on her iPad using Procreate, a digital painting programme she first started using for work a few years ago. “I decided to treat the lockdown as an opportunity to practice and build up my drawing skills,” she says. “It was the best thing at the beginning when it was really quiet and there was no one around. It was eerie, seeing almost no people around, and it was just something I felt I needed to document.”

One thing Malin has found time for during lockdown is building a new website. “I already had a Squarespace site for my interior design work,” she says, “so I knew it was a very user-friendly platform. I wanted to keep it simple and take all the material from my old website and add some new and updated material from my production design work. I’d never had all my work in one place before, and Squarespace makes it so easy to gather everything together and create an online portfolio.” This in turn has given her more time to hone her skills and focus on the creative building blocks which were a crucial element of this commission.

By spending more time taking in her surroundings, Malin has been able to work on her mental wellbeing too. “This whole experience has actually been very healthy for me,” she reflects. “For the last five or so years it has been pretty much non stop, working back-to-back jobs. I used to do a lot of smaller gigs – commercials and music videos – whereas now I mostly do TV series which can be very time-consuming and draining. The pandemic has been tough in many ways, but it’s been good for me to not work and instead just enjoy being at home. Before, I wasn’t making time for drawing outside of work – now I’m taking photos and drawing just for the pleasure of it. I tend to look for moments, often situations that are quite filmic. I take a lot of inspiration from geometric shapes and unusual, unconventional architecture, which I suppose is why I’ve mainly been drawing buildings around London.”

By her own admission Malin has always been something of a restless soul, constantly drawn to new places and new experiences. New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, London: all pit stops on her journey to realising her professional dream. So although she’s found solace in her surroundings more recently, you get the sense that wherever her work takes her in future she’ll always seek out the path less travelled. “Production design is all about creating emotions around a space, and I love the freedom that you get on smaller, low-budget projects, especially when it’s somewhere unfamiliar. It’s more hands-on and you’ve got to make magic with what you have.”

Malin Lindholm and all of the creatives featured in our Creative Resilience series use Squarespace as an easy and affordable website builder to get their work out there in a beautiful way. If you’re thinking of sharing your own vision with the world, start building your Squarespace website today with a free trial – no credit card required! Use the discount code LWLies when you’re ready to go live.

Read more stories from our series on Creative Resilience, in partnership with Squarespace.

This story is part of Creative Resilience, an editorial series produced in collaboration with Squarespace.

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“It’s so important in this day and age not just to think about going green, but to actually do it. The fashion industry is responsible for so many hazardous chemicals being used, so much waste and environmental destruction, I just felt that I had to make a concerted change in my personal and professional life.” Like so many people working in the film and television industry, the global pandemic has forced Jo Thompson to pause and take stock. As a costume designer with more than 30 years experience and a wide range of credits, from This Is England to Fleabag, she’s acutely aware of the sustainability issues facing her trade. She believes that now is the perfect time to start rewriting the playbook. “It seems completely absurd to spend thousands and thousands of pounds on one item of clothing,” she says, “especially when there are plenty of other means of sourcing materials and making clothing.”

Born and raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, Jo relocated to Nottingham (via Nigeria) to study before eventually settling in South London. After graduating university in the mid-’80s with a degree in theatre design, she quickly realised that staying on her chosen career path would be more difficult than she had anticipated. “My early work, especially during college, was very political,” she recalls, “quite often with a feminist slant. That’s really what I wanted to be doing, but I couldn’t sustain a living in London. There was just no money in it. So I ended up just working for free, doing lots of fringe theatre, very small-scale stuff where I would make everything from the costumes to the sets. I actually got a cleaning job for a time to supplement my income.”

Using colours harnessed from the natural things around you embeds an ethical approach

 

A placement at the famed agitprop theatre company 7:84, founded by the British playwright John McGrath, enabled Jo to further hone her craft and politics (the company’s name was taken from a statistic, first published in The Economist in 1966, that seven per cent of the UK’s population owned 84 per cent of the country’s wealth). From there, she landed a gig as a dresser at the London Palladium, which led to her being accepted onto a training scheme at the BBC. This comparatively corporate environment didn’t always agree with Jo, but she saw it as her passport to the world of film, which had always been her ultimate ambition. The four years she spent being nurtured creatively by Auntie proved invaluable. “At that time [at the BBC] it was fairly common to start an entire production literally from scratch. If you were doing a period drama, say, you’d be given the budget to have a work room and to get things sourced and dyed and printed. That scheme doesn’t exist any more, so I was very lucky really. It was a very hands-on, practical way of working, and I suppose what I’m doing now relates back to that same process.”

Jo’s big break in film came in 2006 when she was hired to work on Shane Meadows’ BAFTA-winning skinhead drama This Is England. “I’d heard they were looking for a costume designer,” she remembers, “so I reached out to Warp Films, the production company, and they set up a meeting with Shane. Luckily he knew my work already, because I’d already worked on lots of TV projects, commercials and short films by that point, so he just wanted to meet me to make sure we would get on. We met in Nottingham and sat outside on a step for about an hour, chatting about the world. This Is England was great because I got to do a lot of hand-dyeing and bleaching. It’s quite a stylised film, and there’s a really strong colour palette running throughout it. It was very creative and collaborative. Also, coming from the North, it very much reflected all the tribalism, the subcultures and the labels that were around when I was growing up.”

Sketching is as much a part of Jo’s process as the idea itself.

 

Given that she describes her favourite projects as those which allow her to collaborate closely with a writer/director, how has Jo found working in isolation over the past few months? “I’m so used to being surrounded by people every day, so it’s been quite strange suddenly having nobody around. I know it’s been the same for a lot of people, but when your work is usually so collaborative it’s difficult to adjust to another way of working. Actually, I quite enjoyed the early part of the lockdown, just having more time to do the things I’m not always able to fit into my day. At first, I set myself a task: to do one drawing every day. But realised I wanted to challenge myself further. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This is my chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do – don’t waste it.’”

The creative world that Jo inhabits is firmly analogue – steeped literally in physical texture and colour. Yet the rise of the digital world has facilitated her own creativity. “I really am not an expert in the internet or building websites – far from it!”, she says… “but with the Squarespace website building format and all the templates you can use, it’s really easy to image the site as a portfolio and to just stop messing about and publish your work.” And in the film industry, visibility is crucial, of course. “My Squarespace website is more than just a folio for me too. It’s a way to share work with other creatives and to get feedback on the work itself. It helps to confirm that you’re doing good stuff and that people like the direction in which you’re travelling – which when you’re flying solo is really important.”

The tactile nature of hand dyeing adds yet another layer to a deeply creative process.

 

It says a lot about Jo’s creative instincts and general outlook on life that not only has she managed to adjust during lockdown, she’s also developed a new way of working – one she hopes the rest of her industry will embrace once normal service has resumed. Harking back to her days at 7:84 and the BBC, she’s been experimenting with different dyeing techniques using naturally-derived colours. “I do a lot of dyeing in my work,” she says, “so I thought that if I’m spending all this time at home, why not use what’s readily available. The one rule I gave myself was that it had to be something I already had in my kitchen, so it’s using things like avocados and coffee, or hibiscus flower tea or black turtle beans.”

As a lifelong vegan, Jo has always been environmentally conscious, so in one sense moving away from using synthetic dyes feels like a natural progression. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading up about my industry recently, and it’s terrible the amount of waste that’s produced. I always try to use fabrics from ethical sources, but it’s not always easy. You’re trying to challenge the conventional way of doing things, which has been the same for a very long time – even though we’ve been using natural dyes and animal dyes since the Egyptians.” Jo admits that the natural dyeing process is very slow, but says she’s already thinking about how her homespun methods could be factored into a typical production schedule. “It’s definitely achievable.”

The camera hates synthetic fabrics – for Jo, the use of sustainable products makes creative sense.

 

There’s not just an ethical advantage to using organic, sustainable products. “I find that the camera hates synthetic fabrics,” Jo says. “The red dress in Peter Strickland’s In Fabric, for example, could have been made with a cheap mixed fibre, but the beauty of the silk is that it’s much more subtle on camera – even though it’s bright red – and it absorbs the light much better. The softness of it, the way it floated, you wouldn’t get that with a man-made fibre. Because film production is such a pressurised environment – it’s all about money and time – it’s quite hard to put into practice, but it’s been good to think about projects I’ve worked on previously, like In Fabric, and question how I could have done that more sustainably.

Prior to lockdown, Jo had just completed work on another Warp Films project, Little Birds, a six-part series adapted from Anaïs Nin’s collection of erotic short stories, which is due to air in August. While film and TV production in the UK is slowly starting up again, Jo accepts that it could be a while before things are back to business as usual. Good thing, then, that she plans to continue finding new ways to be creative and keep busy. “I want to experiment with embroidery next,” she says, “The thing that lockdown has brought home to me is that I need to have something else as a back up which doesn’t necessarily involve filmmaking. If something like this were to happen again, I need to have a back up.”

Jo Thompson and all of the creatives featured in our Creative Resilience series use Squarespace as an easy and affordable website builder to get their work out there in a beautiful way. If you’re thinking of sharing your own vision with the world, start building your Squarespace website today with a free trial – no credit card required! Use the discount code LWLies when you’re ready to go live.

Read more stories from our series on Creative Resilience, in partnership with Squarespace.

This story is part of Creative Resilience, an editorial series produced in collaboration with Squarespace.

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“The process can start with just a texture, or with just a building, or a sense of place.” I’m standing with production designer Bobbie Cousins on the corner of Grafton Street in London’s Somers Town. “Sometimes there’s a script and sometimes there isn’t,” he says, “either way, it’s about exploration, about delving into the ideas through the surfaces of things. I then go away and piece together a texture – and that then becomes a colour palette, or a sketch of a set.”

The design process for Bobbie Cousins often begins with immersing himself in a location. The layered textures of Somers Town are particularly evocative.

 

Somers Town is a textured neighbourhood through which, even if you’re a native Londoner, you probably haven’t passed. It’s tucked to the east of Euston Station, to the north and the west of St Pancras and the British Library, and south of Camden. It’s one of those increasingly rare London corners where time and the process of gentrification appears to have frozen. “When I come across a place like this,” says Bobbie, “there’s some kind of shift in me, and I start thinking of story and character. There’s something about the juxtapositions, the strangeness of discovered places, that I love.”

Grafton Chambers has a powerful presence on the southern edge of Somers Town. The home of a central character, and a character in its own right.

 

Red Brick Peabody estates dating from the Victorian era are punctuated in the Somers Town landscape with modernist low-rises with subterranean garage spaces and gardens bursting beautifully into bloom this early June. Describing the periphery to the north and the east are elegant Georgian terraces and Villas. Here on the southern extremity of the neighbourhood up against the strangely quiet, locked down murmur of the Euston road, estates that hint at faded art deco face the familiar London constellation of kebab houses, corner shops and boozers.

We’re looking at Grafton Chambers, a six-storey, yellow-brick apartment building gilded with arches and wrought iron railings that guard dark balconies and porches. “There’s a feeling of… foreboding that I get from this sort of space,” he says, “and that’s what I’ll try to evoke in my response to the idea.”

Production design involves interiors as well as locations. The craft is to carry an evocative feel and a colour palette through both contexts.

 

The 34-year-old Manchester native is in the middle of a developing trajectory in the art departments of film and TV. After school and some time on the road, he did art foundation at Manchester Met and then went on to Nottingham Trent University to study Fine Art. “It was a really great introduction to working on film,” he says. “I realised at uni that as well as making something, it was great to have the payoff of a film that went out there in the world. There is something amazing about creating something in three dimensions and then seeing it part of this wider thing that becomes part of peoples’ lives.”

Bobbie made his debut making and dressing sets on cult comedy series Father Ted’s Christmas Special, and he’s most proud of his production design work with director Georgia Parris on the beautifully textured dance drama Mari. “The experience of making things and working with characters and then seeing that develop on screen, that grew very gradually,” he explains. “I wanted to be able to apply the art practice that I had developed into a real life situation on set.”

In Peter Strickland’s feature film In Fabric, Bobbie served as Supervising Art Director. “I was able to get deeply involved in all aspects of the design in the evocation of this made-up world, from special effects and prosthetics and sets to lighting and costume. It brought together so many collaborative processes. That experience made me see that this was the direction I’d like to go in”.

The collaboration at the heart of any film making process is composed of elements like Bobbie’s drawing and photographs. They in turn become documents – part of the material culture of the production.

 

Commercial projects and promos are the meat and drink that hone the craft. “There’s an intensity to working on smaller productions that’s invaluable,” he says. “You have to be incredibly focused and resourceful. It pushes you to come up with really creative solutions.” One of those solutions was making a fortune telling 3D model of Ian Brown for King Monkey’s promo. “I must find out where Ian’s head is right now. That is an artefact I wish I had been able to keep.”

During the lockdown Bobbie, like so many creatives, has been aching to work on a live production. “I’ve been imagining being able to have the opportunity to build every set, to really create the world. But these past months I’ve been finding myself increasingly drawn to the creative process itself, even though it’s been impossible for anyone to work on live projects. I’ve been thinking about place and form and texture. Spending time here in Somers Town, I can feel the process of making a piece of work beginning. Finding a space engages you and creates feelings. Immersing in an imaginary space is an enveloping experience that leads to the work itself.”

The enforced hiatus in production has also created an opportunity to hone his presence on the web. “I tried all the other ways of making a website,” he says, “but it wasn’t until I got involved with Squarespace that it became something that really helped me define what it was that was my speciality. I’ve used Squarespace for 10 years. It made me feel as if I was a really good coder, with all the templates and the tools on the back end. Now, my website has really become a way to curate my work and to show the thread through all the things I’ve done.”

In building this space, the creative process itself has become clearer to Bobbie. “I’m able really easily to adapt it all the time to what makes me feel good when I open up my web page… and now I can do all this via the app on my phone.”

If you are ready to share your vision with the world? Start building today: use the code LWLIES for a discount on a new Squarespace website here.

Read more stories from our series on Creative Resilience, in partnership with Squarespace.

This story is part of Creative Resilience, an editorial series produced in collaboration with Squarespace.

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“When I started making GIFs, it was basically just a way to talk with my friends, to make jokes,” says Laurène Boglio. The Little White Lies art director’s subtle energy has defined the look and feel of the magazine for the last three years. She doesn’t give too much away about what motors that energy. Until she feels that you are her friend.

“At first I just saw GIFs as these really condensed little pieces of storytelling,” she says, “but I soon realised that they were a perfect tool for me. I am an introvert; I don’t spend much time being social, I don’t like talking to strangers. I’m not a depressive person, it’s just that I’m happiest when I’m alone and when I’m drawing. So it’s easier for me to share things about myself in this way. Much easier than doing these things face to face!”

“I would like to see cats go on strike. They are being exploited in the instagram feeds of locked down humans…”

 

Laurène was born and raised in the beautiful city of Annecy in the French Alps. Never really at home with what she calls “all these healthy people happily running in the fields,” as a teenager she went to study at Les Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg before arriving in London via Paris. Stints at various advertising agencies and design houses led to freelance work creating GIFs for platforms like TUMBLR and GIPHY. Once she moved to London a chance encounter with Little White Lies led to her current position at the creative helm. And for Laurène, the journey would have been impossible without being able to get her work out there via the web.

“For someone who spends so much time on their own, having a digital presence that looks beautiful and works simply is absolutely essential,” she says. “It has definitely helped me as an introvert, to say things in drawings that would be impossible to say without having an online platform…” These tiny slices of storytelling are perfectly suited to meet the demands of the digital age. And much of Laurène’s freelance work still comes directly from the contact tab of her Squarespace site. “Commissions that are all about my personal style, the black and white, darker stuff, always comes direct from the website – and often these develop into work for bigger brands.”

One of the defining things about Laurène is that it’s impossible to pigeon hole her. “I think it’s really important that you don’t allow yourself to be defined by one single thing, she says. If you can develop a range of skills within what you do, and then represent that, the possibilities become much more broad. Unexpected things will come your way.”

“Sometimes I would like to smash all my devices and just look out into a beautiful landscape. That would be real catharsis for me.”

 

When Taylor Swift’s people commissioned Laurène to produce a series of animated assets for her 2018 world tour, it was something of an irony. “Before I worked on the project I didn’t know much about Taylor’s music,” she says. “But I love to collaborate, and I like it when my work has to fit into a wider picture.”

The brief was to create animated banners that would represent the respective cities on the global stadium tour. “Because I am a graphic designer I was really interested in what the font was going to be, what the ratio would be of the illustrated elements to the logo etc. I am used to doing the whole thing, so I was able to bring layout and type treatments as well as illustration and GIFs to the project – and in the end it defined the whole identity for the tour. It was brilliant to be able to integrate my work into what already existed. We had to create 35 banners for the different stops in the tour, so it was a real challenge. But my real takeaway was that my work could literally stand up for itself on the world’s stage. And I realised that my dream commission hasn’t happened yet. I would love to make a full length animated music video.”

Though she’s still waiting for a knock on the door from Gene Simmons, during the recent weeks and months the world has swivelled into a space that Laurène has always occupied. “I haven’t been getting out for walks any more than usual,” she says. “I have always walked everywhere. I have always loved house plants. I have always spent time at home making things. Now everyone is doing it!”

“Many humans dream of communing with nature. It won’t happen.”

 

And where the masses seem to be switching on to the world of home entertainment, Laurène has typically eschewed binge watching on streaming services. “I don’t like to fill my head with too much random stuff,” she says. “I like to be really selective and watch films that I can take something from. But occasionally I also like to watch something really trashy, for escapism. I like something a bit ‘clever’ and something totally two dimensional. I like bad films. They de-stress me.”

There is a subtlety and brevity to Laurène’s observational powers that finds the perfect expression in the lines of the drawings she creates. And though there is a tangible introspection to the way she interacts with the world, as a personality she is drily hilarious. Presiding over the visual character of Little White Lies makes sense. Her work comes together with the quickness and exactitude of a true auteur.

“Sometimes I think my most successful work is the very small pieces which convey something emotional that happened to me,” she reflects. “If, for example, I get dumped or stood up by someone, and I’m sitting around on my own at home being miserable, I will create a GIF and send it out into the world – something emerges from the negative. I can contain all these feelings in a series of drawings. I can make them live, and then I can send them away. It’s like, ‘That’s what I felt; that’s what happened; here it is: bye bye!’ It’s completely cathartic for me.”

“Beautiful things are the fruit of patience. I realised this a long time ago. Now everyone has caught on.”

 

There is something very… French… about Laurène, though that identity is a complex nexus of elements – and when you live away from home, there is another layer. “There is a nugget of truth at the heart of every cliché,” she says. “French people love to complain about everything. I had to live somewhere else to realise that this was true of French people, and myself. We can create a drama over nothing. We love to ruminate and to be difficult. These ideas don’t come from nothing.”

But have the careworn clichés of Frenchness been an advantage or the opposite for Laurène in her line of work? The jury is still out. “I am a visual artist. I receive a brief, I send the artwork, so I don’t really have to talk with anyone,” she says. “And anyway, I don’t really like talking to strangers. This reinforces the stereotype of myself as this ‘mysterious Frenchwoman’. I don’t wear a beret and dark glasses, but you know what – I might start! Perhaps I need to be more mysterious!”

Create a digital presence that reflects your visual identity. Use the code LWLies to get a discount on a new Squarespace website.

Read more stories from our series on Creative Resilience, in partnership with Squarespace.

With thanks to Stéphanie Sergeant for her help on the animations.

Every day, people across the world are facing brand new hurdles as they adapt to unprecedented change. Freelancers are navigating a unique set of challenges as budgets are slashed and uncertainty takes hold. What is it like to go it alone in this new, rapidly changing world?

Creative Resilience is a brand new series, produced in collaboration with Squarespace, sharing inspiration, advice, and original artwork from freelance creatives as they adapt to life under lockdown. Over the next five months, we’ll explore what it’s like to go it alone in a time of crisis, spotlighting creativity amid disruption.

From sustaining a career as a self-taught photographer, to carving out a creative identity in a crowded city far from home, these tales of resolve show how obstacles give rise to innovation. The journey there is as difficult as it’s ever been — but the payoff has never been more rewarding.

Follow along for stories from across Huck and Little White Lies.

#01 The comic artist using isolation as inspiration

Miranda Smart shares how she’s overcome the trials of lockdown to evoke the world outside her window.

#02 The illustrator who brings light to the darkness and darkness to the light

Sophie Mo on how she continues to carve out a creative identity in the most trying of times.

#03 The director blending modern London with Iranian aesthetics

Filmmaker Somayeh Jafari shares how she delves into her Iranian background to discover the true meaning of home.

#4 The art director who creates humorous, introspective snapshots of everyday life

Little White Lies very own Laurène Boglio reflects on how she observes the world’s subtle shifts through animated GIFs.

#5 The artist leading floristry’s youthful takeover

Harriet Parry reveals how she creates eye-catching floral interpretations of iconic artworks.

#6 The production designer who uses location as inspiration

Bobbie Cousins shares his creative process, evokes a world that’s seldom seen.

#7 The photographer reimagining creative communities

Photographer and curator Matt Martin tells us how he uses photography to build community.

#8 The costume designer dyeing to make film more sustainable

Jo Thompson explains why she’s ditching synthetics for natural products.

#9 The family-run bar that’s a hub of creative independence

Verity and Sharmaine Cox tell the story of their tiny Hackney dive bar Blondies – a space where music, motorbikes and skateboarding mingle freely.

A brief guide to designing your own tattoo

Illustrator Sophie Mo talks you through how you can go about designing your own tattoo

A brief guide to creating your own floral art

Floral artist Harriet Parry lifts the lid on her creative process and how you can make your own floral humans at home.

#10 The production designer who finds inspiration on the open road

Malin Lindholm reveals how she’s continued to feed her wanderlust and her reactive process during the pandemic.

Create a digital presence that reflects your visual identity. Use the code LWLies to get a discount on a new Squarespace website.

Read more stories from our series on Creative Resilience, in partnership with Squarespace.

This story is part of Creative Resilience, an editorial series produced in collaboration with Squarespace.

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“In terms of mental health, creativity is my best friend and my worst enemy,” says Sophie Mo. The 24-year-old Vilnius-born artist has become one of the linchpins of the Little White Lies art department. She has brought her line and dot work to the textures and characters featured in the magazine – as well as LWL book projects. She is an in-demand tattoo artist too – and she brings a fundamental part of herself to everything she does. “My work is the thing I can always turn to to make me feel happy,” she says, “but I am so identified with it that it’s difficult to separate sometimes…”

Sophie is in a familiar stance in her locked down work space: hunched over a lightbox, earphones plugged in, her face intently focussed and bathed in white tungsten light. She is drawing though a thin piece of paper and speaking as she always does – quickly, thoughtfully, reflectively. “It’s not very healthy to be like this in many ways,” she says, “you have days when you think, ‘What am I if this all goes away?’ But it’s how I’ve developed who I am, my work ethic and the person I am becoming. I’m not sure that can ever really change.”

Being over-identified with a particular style is often the price you have to pay to fly solo creatively. And doing this far from home at a young age, not to mention in an intensely competitive creative scene, sharpens the edge of things. “I was always a black sheep in Belorussia and Lithuania where I went to school. I never really identified with the people around me. I was more influenced by things that I came across on the internet – creating your own work, and then being able to have your own platform helps you feel part of a wider community, a group of like minds you might not have met in your school yard.”

Having first encountered London on a summer trip at the age of 16, it was perhaps inevitable that Sophie would form her creative identity here. “I was this mini goth bumbling about trying to get a job,” she says. “I realised straight away that you can’t really be an outsider here in London. Everyone is outside. There is no single ‘inside’. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

Once she’d finish school it was straight back to study at Illustration and Visual Communication at Westminster University. She graduated with first class honours. “I think the gothic thing gives me a way to situate myself in relation to the world around me. There is a lot of darkness out there, and my way of seeing the world is about acknowledging that and embracing it. It’s about not shying away from that and pretending that it doesn’t exist.”

To draw characters from the world of movies and music is a reflex action, and Sophie always manages to bring a dark, gothic aspect to the portraits she creates, whether she’s drawing Danny DeVito or The Dude. There’s something very effective in the treatment. “When I’m stuck on a commission I just naturally like to draw a character from a playlist I’m listening to, or I’ll be streaming a movie and I’ll start drawing one of the cast. I like to take a character that already exists, and then transform it. I bring something of me to the character. Hopefully that makes you consider that character a little bit more closely.”

The strong visual identity of Sophie’s work is mirrored in her presence. Could it be that she is a self-forged character in her own powerful play? “How you come across is so important,” she says. “And sometimes it is difficult to separate that side of working life from the artistry of what you do. You become a character within your work. That develops unconsciously. Sometimes if I go into certain situations I feel like I turn up the ‘Sophie Mo character’ to 11, even if I do that unconsciously. I’d like not to do that, but I think that when I’m working on a project that’s new it’s quite hard to ‘detune’ myself.”

It’s hard to overestimate the difficulties of establishing a niche within London’s creative industry, and impressive that Sophie has been able to gain a foothold.” I’m not there yet. You have to get out there and hustle every day,” she says. “And you can’t be worried about embarrassing yourself. Things go wrong on every project, but you can’t let that worry you. You become immune to your own bullshit. You learn how to power through struggles because you get so used to them.”

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