Sometimes, all it takes to see an ordinary object differently is a few carefully placed lines or a drawn-on face. That playful way of looking at everyday life lies at the heart of French artist Romain Joly’s work. Based in the south of France, Joly combines photography and drawing to create simple visual scenes in which familiar objects take on completely new identities. Food, household items, plants, and other things most of us would barely notice become characters, animals, landscapes, and sometimes silly visual jokes.
Bored Panda has featured Joly’s inventive creations before, and his newer pieces continue the same playful approach while finding fresh possibilities in the objects around him. Humor is an important part of the work, but there is also something pleasantly poetic about seeing such familiar things transformed through such simple ideas. Rather than hiding the original object, Joly usually makes its shape, texture, or function essential to the idea. Coffee beans become a leopard’s spots, a shoe forms the body of a cat, and the spiral of a corkscrew becomes the serpent rising from a snake charmer’s basket. The result sits somewhere between illustration, photography, and a small exercise in visual imagination.
Scroll down to see more of Romain Joly’s creative object-based illustrations, and let us know which were your favorites.
