We talk of old souls, but the illustrator George Butler is truly a man from another time – his solid name, BBC English, russet beard and gentle good manners make him appear straight out of central casting for a Great War epic.

Not for him the churn of modern journalism – the frantic filing, the snapping, the immediate posting. This is someone who illustrates the news: he stops, looks, looks again, makes friends with his subjects and then draws them solicitously while drinking tea and chatting the day away. He often finishes his scenes weeks later, colouring and refining them back at home in Peckham, south-east London.

Butler, who grew up near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, is only 39, but he has already made a career out of travelling to countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine, Libya, Angola and, his great passion, Syria, documenting, in his distinctive ink on paper, the stories of those affected by monstrous regimes and the fallout of war. His work appears in newspapers, the V&A has some of those drawings from Syria and Ukraine in its collection, and he was commissioned by the National Army Museum during the Covid crisis. He doesn’t have a gallery, preferring to represent himself, but he sells independently to collectors, usually those with an emotional connection to the countries he is portraying. In his 2014 TEDx talk he offers a heartfelt argument for the revival of illustration as reportage, a tradition made nearly extinct by the instant gratification of photography.

Talking of which, while journalists, photographers and TV crews (many of whom he counts as friends) are compelled to shoot bulletins, get quotes and move on, Butler argues that he has the privilege of being able to linger (he calls it “slow news”). The very nature of his work means that he can really get to know his subjects, speaking in his beginner’s Syrian Arabic or through a translator. His models don’t have to be the key figure in a front-page news story; they might be a bereaved child, a long-suffering mother or a shop owner who, for fear of being shopped by regime spies, is wary of traditional media.

That he and his models must be safe enough to set up for the period it takes to complete a drawing means he is rarely in any real danger, unlike war reporters on the front lines. Butler has been on hostile-environment courses over the years and took the body armour he required in Ukraine with him on a recent trip to Damascus, thinking that it might still be “a kinetic place”, but found no need to put it on. He is light on his feet thanks to minimal gear: a knackered £12 A2 portfolio case that he got on Amazon, loose paper, pens (he uses Gillott nibs, numbers 303 and 404, and Indian ink). He doesn’t use sketch pads as he doesn’t like the expectations they carry (if something isn’t good enough you feel you must rip it out).

This gentle medium certainly lends itself to conveying the reverberations from the epicentre of conflict. It’s no surprise that he cites the American war reporter and writer Martha Gellhorn, who sought out human stories, and Ronald Searle, who drew while incarcerated in the notorious Changi Gaol in Singapore in 1944, as two of his biggest influences.