Ginette Lapalme is a Toronto-based illustrator, crafter and cartoonist. She has been sharing with Magic Pony and Narwhal Art Projects her magical little treasures, fantastic zines, original drawings and beautiful prints!

You have just been featured in Beautiful/Decay’s new Book #7: Class Clowns. This issue places focus on artists whose work is loaded with meaning, and a  powerful punch line that keeps us coming back for more. What messages do you bring to the table through the incredible world you’ve made? 

GL: I’m not always super cognizant of what message I am trying to get across when I begin a drawing. Often times I am just trying to amuse myself, and I guess in turn also hoping I will amuse my audience. Two things that really drive me are shapes and colours, there’s one shape I’m really attracted to recently, and the best way I can describe it is it’s that shape you get when you make a tight fist around a ball of playdoh. I love that shape. Now I’m really wondering whether I’m still mentally a four year old, haha.

For my piece in Beautiful/Decay’s Class Clowns I really just felt like sticking it to my Catholic upbringing a bit, so I placed a lot of Christian symbols and dirty stuff in there like discretely pissing in a chalice. I’m still a little kid.

Your characters exist in the 2D, 3D and video realm, what’s your favourite medium to work in and why? 

GL: It’s very difficult for me to choose one over the other because they are all really satisfying in different ways, but certainly over the past year I’ve mostly concentrated my efforts on creating small miniatures, figurines and jewelry pieces.I’ve always been really into ‘crafting’ for lack of a better word. I love collecting and I adore objects and it seemed quite natural for me to step away from creating art you can hang and move towards art you can wear or play with like toys. I like to make things that can be touched and manipulated.

What has been most long-lastingly inspirational to me throughout my life has been cartoons so a part of me really aches to make more videos, I simply haven’t devoted enough time to learning that craft quite yet to create the kind of videos I would really love. I feel I have a lot of limitations when it comes to video art, which is why I’ve mostly just created short snippets and gif based animations. Movement is often something I think about when drawing though, especially when it comes to creating characters. I imagine how they would walk and sway. I like considering malleability.

Whose work have you been following? Please share with us your artistic influences.

GL: Everything influences me. I’m really obsessed with the internet, websites like tumblr and reddit are real roadblocks of productivity for me, but they bring me so much to look at and think about. I’ve been keeping a tumblr for images I enjoy (mewnette.tumblr.com) and also another one specifically for religious inspired art (deimosandphobos.tumblr.com). To name a few specific artists though, I’m really inspired and enamored by the work of Misaki Kawai, Mogu Takahashi, Ines Estrada, Amy Lockhart, and Sally Cruikshanks.

I was in some of your classes back at OCAD University. Your illustrations always stood out; the colours, the characters and the whimsy you fabricated were unlike anything I had seen before. How has your style evolved since your days of being the Class Clown? 

GL: It’s difficult to pin point what it is about my work that does evolve.  Sometimes it seems to me as though all that changes are the characters I keep in my arsenal. Some new friends crop up every once in awhile and I tend to use a few of them extensively for some period of time and then they’ll disappear for awhile. I certainly have changed mediums quite a bit since our last year at OCAD. While at school I primarely used gouache mediums and also did a bit of silkscreening during thesis year. Since then I’ve mostly worked in a mixture of inks and watercolours and also with more maleable materials like polymer-clay, found figurines and other crafting supplies (like glue-gun sticks)! I try and work with whatever seems most fun to me at the time.

In addition to creating solo works, you are also part of Toronto-based comic/cartooning collective, Wowee Zonk. How has working in a collaborative manner impacted the way you create art? 

GL: Working with Chris Kuzma and Patrick Kyle has really done wonders for me, especially when it comes to just being more confident with my pen strokes. I haven’t always felt ‘able’ to draw directly in ink. I used to be quite skittish with my pencil strokes, spending way too much time erasing and worrying about how I was drawing things instead of enjoying creating each stroke. When the three of us started working together - and I nearly added quotations to the word ‘working’ - it was really just a matter of collaborative doodling, but it was really all the three of us needed to develop more confidence. We’d play off of each other a lot too which was really fun. We share a lot of similar inspiration sources (cartoons & comics mostly) and creating things collaboratively within these complementary worlds is quite easy. It’s like speaking and sharing in a covert language.

Lastly, what’s next? What magical things are you working on at the moment? 

As of this moment we (speaking also of Patrick Kyle and Chris Kuzma) are finishing up our fourth issue of Woweezonk - the anthology that gave us our collective title - which will be graciously published by Koyama Press and is set to be released at TCAF in May. I also am focusing quite a bit on forever-expanding my ETTE brand - I’ve been hard at work on sticker packs, a new line of jewelry pieces, miniature art books and zines and perhaps a comic series of my own ! (I do have to compete with Patrick Kyle’s Black Mass and Chris Kuzma’s Complex series, after all♥)

A huge thank-you to Ginette for taking the time out of her schedule to answer our questions. Come by the shop to have a look at Ginette’s multitude of works in person, or check out the online store.

-Megan