I Think I Love You… Julia Pott
Stone the crows, get out the best china; Julia Pott is gracing Lou Lou & Oscar with her words and pictures today! It is so hard to know where to begin with Julia’s work, ace illustrator, stellar animator, purveyor of candy-sweet unicorns and the most beautiful inter-species love affairs. Julia’s funny and heartbreakingly tender tales of love, loss and unrequited passion posses a universality that we can all relate too. Everyone can understand the emotions conveyed by Julia’s anthropomorphic animals, who doesn’t pity a heartbroken Panda? Julia’s work is also aesthetically dazzling, her animation so ‘warm’, she is bringing hand drawn animation back! It is no surprise that Julia’s animated films clock up hits into the millions on YouTube, she is such a star.
Tell us a little about yourself, the media you work with and your creative process.
I am an illustrator and an animator based in London, England. I am a bit obsessed with drawing and need to stop myself every so often so I don’t become a bit of a hermit (although I fear it’s too late!). I graduated in 2007 and since then I have been taking up various freelance projects and trying to establish myself as an animator. I like to work with hand drawn animation and all of my work, whether animation or illustration tries to steer away from the computer as much as possible.
I like to incorporate collage into my work and most of it comes from things I find in charity shops and old photographs of my parents. In terms of my creative process I tend to draw inspiration from my own experiences and stuff thats going on in my everyday life…and being the somewhat soppy person I am this usually revolves around boys and relationships. The animals I draw and animate I tend to see more as people in animal costumes, exhibiting human behaviour from a more comical perspective.
From where do you draw your inspiration: music, books, people, nature etc?
My studio is cluttered full of my little ponies, china dogs, unicorns and poodle money banks and I draw a lot of my inspiration from this weird collection. I also read a lot of books and love to draw ideas from short stories..my favourites are J.D. Sallinger and Miranda July…speaking of which Me and You and Everyone We Know was the movie that started off my obsession with love and relationships so I owe Miranda July a lot because she is a genius. I also look at other animators, my favourite being Igor Kovolyov. Music is probably one of my main inspirations. I listen to a lot of bands while I am working, mainly casiotone for the painfully alone and kimya dawson because their lyrics fit best with the subject matter I like to focus on.
My friends are also a great source of ideas..they’re all working illustrators and animators and we have the same sense of humor so meeting up with them usually means running around finding loads of joke things to draw and laughing at funny looking animals and watching cartoons. When I used to live with them in a big house in London we never got anything done but we did consume a lot of cake.
If you could talk briefly about the background to one of your pieces which would you choose and why? Please tell us the story behind the piece.
The ‘This is My Boyfriend’ zine is my most recent book and it includes personal drawings created over the last 6 months. Most of my illustrations are autobiographical and this book contains a lot of the illustrations from a book I made for my boyfriend for Christmas about our relationship so they are very personal to me.
The rest of the drawings are those I have just made in my spare time, maybe to work through a problem I’ve been having (such as the ‘It’s No Big Deal’ Piece, included in the book) or just because I really wanted to draw a unicorn that day.
I also try and make paintings for my friends for their birthdays and a lot of them are contained in the pages of this book . The book is designed to flow through, starting with ‘I think we should split up’ and ending with ‘Let’s get back together’.
The illustrations in between look to explore the ups and downs of relationships, and life in general! I suppose this book to me is like my diary in pictures.
Yippee! Julia is such a busy bee and it was lovely of her to take the time to answer my questions. Thank you so much Julia, now I just need to find a bigger house in which to hang all of your wonderful illustrations. Yes, I confess I am a Julia Pott obsessive! There are some more links to Julia’s work below, I told you she was super busy. My son Ishi adores the animation for White Corolla, especially the Horse/Unicorn, it always elicits squeals of delight. Notice all the wonderful details, Panda-Limb-Tag, I love it! Did I forget to mention that Julia has an Etsy shop!
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