Artists We Love: Mouni Feddag

INTERVIEWED BY Lindi Brownell Meiring

When you visit Mouni Feddag’s website and click About, a description comes up that reads: “I am a drawing person born & based in the UK, with a Communications Design degree from the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt in Germany (class of 2014). I am also very nice.”

We love chatting to nice people (who doesn’t?) so we decided to get in touch with this talented and quirky illustrator to chat creativity, style and what’s next.

When did you fall in love with illustrating?

I’ve always drawn – apart from maybe a period before I discovered manga, and a period when I realised it wasn’t acceptable for my age group to like manga. I fell back in love with illustrating when I went to study graphic design at university because it brought me lots of compliments and attention.

What do you love most about being creative?

What I do these days isn’t that creative to be honest. I’m still kind of amazed that people are willing to pay me money for something that I find so easy, that just takes time. I don’t actually love the creative part of illustration too much because that requires concentration, and I’d rather create rote work where I can zone out and listen to podcasts.

Describe your illustration style in a tweet.

I think my style is sometimes mean but always loving (of humans, mainly).

Tell us more about your book Illustration: What’s The Point?. How did the project come about?

It was actually my final year project for my graphic design degree. I’d kind of ended up as an illustration major because I liked the professor’s courses and liked the attention, but I really struggled with the fact that I didn’t feel myself a consumer of the type of illustration we were doing – and didn’t really get the point of a lot of the stylish things being done in the design college, it all seemed kind of frivolous and vain. So I researched and made the book because I genuinely wanted an answer. And also reassurance, because I was about to graduate and have to start asking people to pay me to draw, or design or whatever. Really, it fulfilled its purpose: I’m satisfied with the answers and it got me a decent course score and some nice compliments. Then, a couple years later two lovely and beautiful ladies from Ilex Press contacted me about publishing it – I’m very lucky.

What are your plans for the rest of 2017?

I’m now illustrating a very wonderful, quite big children’s book (written by someone else). Illustration, as a freelance job, isn’t my life though, as I’m not a fan of the loneliness. And I think the things we learned about design and communication are useful and applicable to pretty much anything. So I’m always doing other stuff. Come autumn I’ll be going to my local college to do a science course, which I’m ridiculously excited about because I’ve never had a physics or chemistry lesson in my life.

See more of Mouni’s work at mounifeddag.com. Want to win a copy of Mouni’s book Illustration: What’s The Point? We have one up for grabs as part of an awesome book hamper. Enter here.