Alice Oehr is a commercial illustrator, artist, and designer from Melbourne. Her distinct, colourful style incorporates a love of food, pattern, collage, and drawing. Her background in design informs her art practice with a strong emphasis on bold forms and strong colours. She draws both for work and for fun, which has led her to teaching, speaking, and writing on the subject. Alice’s commercial work has appeared in numerous books as well as on textiles, homewares, and large-scale installations. She has also author-illustrated five of her own books, and exhibited her artwork in various group and solo exhibitions.
After studying Graphic Design at technical school, Alice went on to become a freelance illustrator. This design background has provided great foundations and technical knowledge to pursue a career in illustration and do some printmaking for fun. Like many in her creative field, her practice covers a wide breadth of outcomes. Alice began working on books quite early in her career, and is still creating one or two a year under her own name. In 2022, she published her first book for children. She also works on all kinds of illustration collaborations with local Australian brands, as well as international ones. She tells us; “To keep life interesting I teach digital drawing workshops on the iPad Pro, and I sell my artwork online. I do as much printmaking as I can in my spare time.”
Being trained digitally left its mark on Alice, and she has always enjoyed the “freedom” of working on the computer. She states; “Creating patterns, crisp vector lines, moving things around on the page– these possibilities were brand new and super fun for me initially”. Although she still loves working this way, her work has come 360, and these days she draws pretty much everything by hand and scans it in before playing with it on the computer. Alice comments; “It’s not just about the look for me– it’s the feeling of creating by hand, it allows me to slow down and enjoy the process properly. I cut a lot of shapes out with scissors. I love working with paper. I don’t like working with paint. I like to piece paper things together and lay them out on the computer, I struggle otherwise.”
When Apple released the iPad Pro in 2017, Alice was approached to teach workshops using the new devices, and this is something she has done ever since. She describes; “It’s taught me so much about different mediums, and the myriad ways different people are creative and express that in a drawing. I think working digitally is really freeing and fun– but like everything in life, there is a need for balance, and I love working with paper as well.”
A devotee of the Adobe suite, Alice works solidly within the 2D world. She states; “As people around me all up-skill and make things move (and more!), I wonder often whether that is for me”. She continues; “I love drawing on the iPad and all the brushes it has inside that aren’t mimicking handmade techniques; they’re their own digital thing”. Thus, Alice makes most of her work through a true marriage of analogue and digital techniques. She draws on and cuts shapes from paper, and create textures with pastel and ink. She then scans it all into the computer and collages it together digitally, adding final touches and playing with colours and layout. “I don’t think I could create an artwork that looks good to me without one or the other,” says the artist.
Alice also enjoys the process of creating artworks, and describes screen printing as the “holy grail” for how she wants her artwork to look. For smaller projects, she loves making Risograph prints; “The look is just right and the limited colours of the inks and ability to overprint them is just the type of constraint I enjoy”.
“Food as a ritual and a thread that I can follow when travelling to new places is something I am inspired by every day,” says Alice. Her love for the colours and forms (and tastes) of food has led her to do a lot of work in that area. She is also very inspired by the eye-opening experience of travelling, but after two years in Melbourne over the pandemic, she realised that state of mind can be achieved by just walking a different route to work. “All my life’s it’s been about worshipping the design of Japan and France and Italy (among many others) but these days, living in Australia inspires me more than ever,” states the artist.
A major goal for the future for Alice is to carve out more time for making artwork. She tells us; “I have always been a commercial artist and I thrive when working collaboratively on a brief. But making new personal work only a handful of times a year isn’t enough to really grow my art practice. I’m never happier than when printing something, and I’d love to incorporate this into my life more often.”
Images by Amber Fletcher and Benjamin Thomson
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