Pete Reynolds shares his politically charged portfolio that reflects turbulent times

All doused with what he likes to call "grey humour", his artworks show a varied range of skills and techniques which he blames on an interesting career so far. He graduated as an illustrator, became a designer, then became an illustrator again. "I'm an illustrator who gets frustrated by bad kerning and when I hear 'rivers' and 'widows' in the same sentence, I know there hasn't necessarily been a family tragedy," Pete says.

When he left college he "tried to be a political illustrator", but just couldn’t make ends meet. Then, at an exhibition of Guardian cartoonists, he overheard the curator tell someone that some of their cartoonists struggled to pay their rent. It was at that point that Pete decided to swap politics for good economics and get a design job "that pays".

His work has taken him all over the world – Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Beijing and Munich – but he recently came back to illustration "through the back door", by working as an independent designer and creating the illustration work himself.

Pete describes his work as a mixture of "simplicity, drama, flat colour, texture, dark humour and sometimes light" and says he's "like a clown who wants to be taken seriously or a serious actor armed with a water pistol."

You can discover more at www.followthelights.co.uk.