Amélie du Petit Thouars: Existential Dread is Keeping Me Busy

Amélie du Petit Thouars is a French graphic designer who counts graffiti, collage, cut-up, and the culture of remix as inspiration. She graduated in 2007 with an MA in Art Direction and Graphic Design from Paris school, ESAG-Penninghen. It was during her Erasmus exchange in Prague in 2006 where her love for typography and type design was born. “The experience and change in practice were incredible, it has really influenced the way I see fonts,” says Amélie.

She started working as a freelancer in 2008, and in 2009 in collaboration with her best friend, Eloïse de Guglielmo, she founded Moshi Moshi Studio. The duo focused on print design, and worked on a variety of projects from cosmetics, to contemporary art, and cookbooks. Amélie and Eloïse worked together for more than 10 years creating books, illustrations, posters, visual identities, and more. After such a great run, Amélie wanted to create “new challenges” for herself and decided to concentrate on more personal projects. In 2019, she went solo and created her website and shop to sell her prints and drawings.

“I love creating stories with my visuals and I always try to incorporate words, or lyrics from songs. I love playing with fonts and experimenting with them,” states Amélie. Her style is graphic and decorative, taking inspiration from the Bauhaus movement, artists including Hyeronimus Bosch, Christopher Wool, and the Jugendstil, as well as comic books. Amélie describes; “I like navigating between strict black and white compositions and very intricate, colourful, decorative drawings“.

Her love for experimentation is exhibited in her latest work, Existential Dread is Keeping Me Up at Night what About You?. The piece is her first completely handmade and handbound 16-page fanzine. “It’s very dear to me because it deals with creative writer’s block, anxiety and typographic research,” says Amélie on the publication. As such, the zine is the result of one year of lettering in a notebook; remixed, reworked on Photoshop, glitched out, and finally screen printed as two 8-page folios. Printed in a limited edition of 15, each zine is unique and screen printed in 3 colours; white, blue, and black, on silver paper.

“It was a technical first for me and I learned a lot making this project as I had to figure out how to layout the folios, screen print on a big scale (A0 sheets of paper), print on silver paper, and bind the books once everything was done. This is a labour of love and passion.”

Looking to the future, Amélie hopes to move out of Paris and build her own workshop with a screen printing lab, linocut press, and Riso machine. She continues to practice as an illustrator and poster and book designer, with plans to host exhibitions, and participate in creative markets.

www.ameliedupetitthouars.com
@ameliedupetitthouars

Shop Amélie’s collection on DEPT.STORE.

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