Danny Ische draws pixels, cross-stitch and paperclips – all with a trusty pencil

At first glance, Danny Ische's work looks like it could be screenshots. There's a sleepy cat built from soft, chunky squares, with a trail of Zs drifting towards the ear; a blue cross-stitch dog positioned beside a threaded needle; a smiley face appearing to be made of paperclips. Look closer, and the trick becomes clear. Nothing has been stitched, pixelated or clipped, and every detail has in fact been drawn in pencil – a painstaking process that Danny compares to "painting a house with an eyelash or something".

"I want to make something every day," he says. Rather than waiting for a "burst of divine inspiration for the perfect idea", he has found that making a little progress daily works better. There's even a bit of jealousy involved. "When I see people who are passionate and creative, I almost feel a competitive drive," he admits. "The expectations I have for myself can become misguided because I am jealous. But ultimately, a brief negative reaction can be a catalyst for something rewarding." Living in the big bustling city of New York also helps. Having lived there since moving from a suburb of Minneapolis at 18, he says the city "makes it difficult to sit around and feel like a bystander".

Drawing was always there, even if a career as an artist wasn't. As a kid, he and his best friend drew their own monsters and comics. He later studied painting, worked in art galleries ("almost all jobs in the arts are underpaid and overworked"), assisted a photographer, which he loved, and spent a few years making pizza. "Whenever I had a full-time job, I wished I was drawing," he says, "and when I was drawing, I wished there was someone around to tell me what to do."

Things started to change in 2020. Drawing had been something he did on days off, but people began paying attention. "It was freeing because no one asked anything of me or expected anything of me." He realised he had been making what he thought "an artist in New York" was supposed to make, rather than what would be fun. "I would joke that I was using my drawing experience 'for evil' rather than for good." About two years ago, he went freelance full-time, and his practice now spans album artwork, magazine illustrations, custom text, event posters and even a run of pencil-drawn T-shirts for Carhartt WIP – "pretty much anything that someone believes I can do".

His process starts deliciously messy, and involves research and collecting imagery on a topic before growing it "until it feels like a giant web", usually accompanied by coffee on a long walk with fast music playing. His notes are cryptic: "They will say things like 'checkerboard collage telephone pole' or 'yummy cookies and candy'." He often forgets what they mean, only to rediscover them later. An abandoned drawing might be scanned and given a new life years after it was started.

The materials, meanwhile, barely change. He works on warm white paper with the same pencils – but resists allowing the process to become too predictable. "Not every artwork I make follows the same process in order to escape feeling formulaic," he says. "It's much more interesting to keep people guessing and have them not know what to expect next."

That impulse is clear in the album cover for Quickly, Quickly's I Heard That Noise, which depicts three greyhounds leaping over a wooden fence one after another, each stride drawn in feathery pencil like a frame from a flip-book. In the top corner, a tiny picture of swans floats in hazy grey, the only splash of colour on the page. "It gives a sense of urgency and curiosity to hearing what the noise is," he says.

Then there are the drawings that intentionally impersonate other things. The paperclip smiley and blue cross-stitch dog came from a period when Danny was making computer-based designs inspired by crochet and cross-stitch patterns. "It was a challenge to try to get the illusion right," he says. He has also played with the visual language of contemporary technology, making drawings appear "like they are images overlapping, stretched and warped".

Eventually, though, he reached his limit with the optical tricks. "There was a time when I got tired of pursuing a visual gimmick and wanted to create something more related to traditions of fine art, like the still life, idyllic landscape and naturalistic painting."

Perhaps that restlessness is what keeps the work feeling so open. Danny has a grand ambition – to make something "simply beautiful" that cannot be disputed – but he is equally interested in what happens once a drawing leaves his hands. "It's scary but relieving to post something or show an artwork for the first time because it's like you're giving it away and you're no longer in control of it. For a lot of my drawings, my enjoyment and purpose in making them is to show an illusion, a joke or a trick. In a perfect world, I could be standing next to my drawing 24 hours a day and explain my thinking to absolutely everyone who sees it, but that would negate the purpose of making it to begin with."

For now, he is happy to keep the laughs and illusion intact. "Visual art can be absolutely anything you want it to be; it is important and infinitely complex." And if that means tomorrow's drawing looks nothing like today's, all the better.