Ali J Art & Illustration

Four Best Friends In Good Company

Once upon a time there were four best friends who stood by eachothers side through the good times and the bad. 

They were...........



"In Good Company"
Private commission, 2008
Mixed Media, 10" x 12"

Just the most adoring couple ever

I was commissioned by a lovely couple for some wedding invitations & thankyou cards.  These ones were different to the standard invitation as the couple is very environmentally conscious and are choosing to do everything online - including these invitations!

"True To My Heart"

I like to put secret messages in all of my works somehow and in this one I decided to do it through the text.  Rather then using vintage book pages as I have in the past, I created my own paper using text printed off the computer.  The text was typed up by the soon to be bride and was full of the most adoring and loving notes that the couple had exchanged to eachother in the past.  I didn't want to make their most private conversations public so I snipped the text up and placed it back together out of context.  Words that can be seen, yet text that cannot be understood. 

The more I keep playing around with the written word the more complex I am finding myself out to be.



"Light Of My Life"

I struggled to make the characters look the 'same' as the first work but found I just had to trust myself and just draw.  I'm over the moon with the end result, the couple just 'pop' out of the page.  Aren't they just adorable?  You should see their real life photos - they are so sweet & so adoringly in love.

An Ali J Munny

So, in this effort to break out of 'the box', and be different to whatever a traditional illustrator may be I decided to challenge myself and customize a "do it yourself" toy.

Basically you can buy these vinyl toys that can be anything from 2" to 40" in height.  All of them are plain in colour - they could be white, black or glow in the dark.  Then once you receive them you can transform them into anything you want using whatever you want.  You could dip it into fabric dye, splatter paint on top of it, or do what I did and try and transform it into one of your own characters.

This was my choice of toy........ a Munny.



Cute isn't it?  It is like a monkey with a protruding face, big ears and a chubby body with stumpy legs.  (Completely nothing like any of my girls!)  Usually my girls are tall, some are curvacious, but they have more of a shapely body in comparison to the Munny.  So this was definitely going to be a challenge.

I will admit this was a huge challenge for me and very difficult.  The faces of my girls are quite defined in shape, and it made it hard to work with a different format.  I decided to work with mixed media, and just to play around and see what happened.