‘Don’t scrawl on the walls in that permanent black marker pen!’ scream parents all over the world to their excitably creative children. ‘Or on the furniture! Or on the crockery! Or on your clothes! Or on your faces!’
Luckily, nobody is screaming this to Alex et Marine, a pair of enviably cool French graphic artists who have made their united name scribbling on anything and everything they can get their hands on: canvases and walls, sofas and shoes, mugs and motorcycle helmets.
Inspired by nature (wild animals in particular), tattoo culture, comic books and rock music, the duo use a dot-tattoo technique and gold-leaf stamping to create sublimely intricate and wholly epic ‘’tatouers de murs’ or ‘wall tattooers’, and illustrations of a more diminutive nature on crockery and clothing.
They employ no transfer techniques whatsoever; this brave duo scribble straight onto their chosen canvas in permanent black ink, turning expansive blank white spaces into majestic, roaring lions, furious owls, native Americans sporting elaborately plaited headdresses knotted into their own hair, thickly-furred wolves, screaming bears, glowering gorillas, noisy tigers, wild roses, swirling patterns and the faces of women with hair whipping windily round their heads.
Perhaps it’s time to encourage our children to get scrawling once again?
