Creative scribbles

Creative Designer and JME Founder Jamie Alphonsus

By Fathima Riznaz Hafi

Jamie Alphonsus loves to doodle! She is a creative designer, working on a variety of projects ranging from customised wedding cards to posters and banners for corporates; her favourite mode of expression and communication in most of her work being her doodles. 

She started off doodling for fun during her free time for small projects while balancing a career in advertising but a year ago decided to leave the firm so she can indulge in her love for doodles and designs full-time. 

The Weekend FT sat down with Jamie to find out more about the kind of work she does and learnt a few things about what goes into a creative design, which in Jamie’s case is charcoal, pens and ink! 

 

Creative scribbles

“I don’t actually call them designs or art; I call them ‘creative scribbles’ because art depends on each individual,” she said. “I enjoy doing this a lot because there are a variety of things that one could work on with different types of media; it could be from paint to pencils to charcoal. My work is not the old fashioned ‘paint on canvas’ type – I try to work on different things like, say for a palette I pick various objects and subjects to work on; I try to break out of the routine methods of creating art; I want to do things differently and make use of material such as ink, charcoal and pens rather than the typically used water colours.”

 

Customised cards

Jamie showed us some of the work that she has created, the first batch of which was of course her doodles. She showed cards that she had made with doodles of different kinds of trees for tree huggers. “Doodles and cards are my main thing. I make cards of all sorts – wedding, homecoming or just any random card that is requested,” she said. 

She even designed her own wedding and homecoming cards last year and flashed them at us with a big smile. We noted the way she had incorporated little details that were unique only to the two of them and their experiences together.

“My husband has a light green scooter so I designed the card with the scooter in it,” she said pointing to a little green scooter on the side of the card.

“Whenever I design a card, I sit with the couple for an hour, talk to them and design the card based on their uniqueness,” she explained. “It’s not something where I just pick up a piece and design – it has to be ‘about’ the couple.”

Then she showed us a homecoming card that her friend asked her to make. “They wanted a ‘native sarong’ theme so I designed a card with them wearing the traditional sarong and all that,” she said and called attention to the fact that the figures she drew, though ‘faceless’, also resembled the couple. 

 

Motivational quotes

Jamie creates motivational quotes through doodling and then frames them for her clients to hang on their walls at work or at home. “I’m a Christian so I enjoy scriptures from the bible; those scriptures I choose are general stuff like: ‘Be nice to people’ and when you just put it on text it doesn’t inspire so I doodle and make it look very nice and arty, then people read and it gets to them; so it’s one way of reaching out to different types of people,” she said.

“I also create funny pictures through doodles,” she added, pointing at a picture of a funny-looking cat that she had doodled. “My doodles range from motivational quotes to funny, creative or artistic pieces.” 

Stippling and stripes

Next we were shown art work created entirely by dots. “This is called ‘stippling’; it takes a lot of patience and a lot of time!” she explained. We just stared in awe at the work she had created meticulously by placing nothing but dots, with a pen. 

She then showed some other pieces of work displaying a variety of stripes, with the use of black ink to create a picture. 

Another piece was also about stripes but each stripe carried a different message. Two stripes carried tiny words from a bible scripture handwritten ever-so-neatly while the other stripes carried a mixture of patterns. It looked like a very painstaking achievement so I had to ask her how long it takes to complete a piece and as I guessed, she said it takes weeks. 

 

Branding and advertising

On the more serious side, Jamie also works on branding and advertising for corporate clients. She creates logos, posters, banners, hoardings, company profiles and presentational material. Though it may seem more demanding, work of this sort is nothing new to her, after having been in the advertising industry for many years. 

Merging her strong background in advertising and her eagerness to explore new projects, she is set for a promising future, while holding on to a particular quote that guides her through her challenges: “I believe that ‘Every problem has a creative solution’. It’s not my quote but this goes under anything that I do. It’s a quote that I’ve been sticking to for a couple of years and has been helpful throughout for me because it can be a designing problem or any kind of problem but there is always a creative solution; it’s just a matter of tapping into it.” 

 

Where does the inspiration come from?

“I suppose it’s just things around us. I have not done a degree in designing. I was a student at AOD for a semester to study Visual Communication and then I dropped out. It’s not like I have any paper qualifications for this. I just work with things around me that inspire and tend to get creative. I learnt how to use the software on the computer but the rest of it is simply me being creative. Some people say I was just born with it.

“Most of my experience comes from working because I have been in this designing line for 10 years. I started from scratch. I began as a Junior Graphic Designer and worked my way up to a Senior Designer and to a Web Master and Web Developer. I later moved on to work as a concept designer for an Australian firm and then I became an Art Director in advertising. I came to realise that my passion was into designing rather than developing and it’s not something that I wanted to just sit and design on the computer per se. There was much more to it. So that’s when I decided to move further. 

“I resigned and started my own business branded as JME. It was only after I started doing my business full-time that I was able to immerse myself in doodling – most of my clients enjoy the doodles – I have a lot of happy clients so I thought I should focus on it. 

“The response has been good and it’s escalating.  It’s not like I want a lot of projects; I prefer a variety of projects so I take different types of projects and I work on them. It’s been really good so far. JME has been fully functioning for a year now,” she said. 

 

The master chef

“I love doing what I do; I’m very passionate about it so that’s what drives me through it. Every time my husband is about to go out, he asks if I want anything and I always say, ‘Yes, lots of pens!’ because that’s what I always want.”

She mentioned her husband Rohan Fernando every now and then and is very appreciative that he understands and supports her passion. “I am pursuing my dreams because he has given me the independence; for that I have great love and respect for him,” she said. 

I’m a bad cook though, she whispers and adds, “Rohan always says: ‘My wife does doodles and not noodles’! When I just got married I couldn’t cook anything; I only started to learn to cook after I got married.” 

When asked how things are now after a year of marriage, she said, “I’m still learning how to cook a chicken curry but I guess now I can somewhat manage.”

Alongside her creative designing and several failed attempts to cook a chicken curry, Jamie also actively participates in charity work as one of the partners of The Soup Bowl, a group that organises activities and cooks meals, with the help of volunteers, for elders’ and children’s homes as well as street people. 

Pix by Bhanuka Kirinde