I Just Love Dogs Gaia Alari On Her Wobbly Tactile Drawings Of Animals Bodies And Emotions

Creative Boom: Inspiration Illustration 'I just love dogs': Gaia Alari on her wobbly, tactile drawings of animals, bodies and emotions From charcoal smudging to crosshatching and stretchy animations, the illustrator builds immersive worlds through each frame and pencil mark on paper. Written By: Ayla Angelos 17 August 2026 In Gaia Alari's drawings, you'll see worlds where characters are engulfed in flowers, and pigeons tangled in string.

And if you look for more than a few seconds, you will start noticing the hand behind them – the lines wobbling slightly where a pencil pressed a touch too hard, or the charcoal smudges sitting close to precise crosshatching. Nothing about the work looks rendered or smoothed over by AI; instead, it looks handmade by someone physically involved in every step. That same tactility carries through into her animation and commissioned work too, whether she's working in clay or in the frame-by-frame hand-drawn style she's built her name on, for clients ranging from Coldplay and Beats by Dre to Subpop and Warner.

In one piece for MoMA, bodies are stretching like they're made of dough. In another piece for The Atlantic, a cohort of dogs jump across the frame similar to the visual you imagine when you're counting sheep to fall asleep. Gaia's route into this world wasn't straightforward. She trained in medicine before her interests in contemporary art, cinema and "human studies in general" became impossible to ignore. She took what she calls "a leap of faith", teaching herself to draw and animate from scratch, starting with still images on paper before pushing into increasingly complex moving work.

Over six years, working largely solo, she built a specialism in traditional frame-by-frame animation and video installation, more recently taking on directing and art direction roles on bigger commercial and film projects. As she puts it, "Still learning!" Her inspiration comes almost entirely from visual art. "There is nowhere I feel happier than in a museum," she says – except, perhaps, at the seaside. That fascination goes back to childhood, when Kandinsky's Point, Line to Surface was one of the first books she leafed through, which was written during his Bauhaus period.

"I understood some of it by instinct and brought it with me, until I was able to understand the concepts of the book, as an adult." Her studio now holds a sizeable library of art catalogues, accumulated "in a very spendthrift guise", which she turns to whenever she needs, in her words, "food for thought, or also just a boost". Everything she makes starts from a concept, never a purely surface-level image, and always on paper – "the only space that feels safe for me to move within". From there, she stains the negative space with a mark and lets the story pull characters out half by instinct.

"It's as if I am playing an exquisite corpse game with myself," she explains. "I know I have to go from A to B, but anything can happen in between. This is my peculiarity: of course when I have to be more controlled, I storyboard and come up with ideas that I pre-plan: I always allow myself a bit of space to wander off." Her New York Times Magazine collaboration with art director Annie Jen is a recent favourite, involving illustrations for Sam Anderson's essay Walnut and Me and a whole bunch of dogs. It let her explore pacing text and image together with "a minimalistic children's book quality", she says.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The article presents a unique perspective on brand storytelling through tactile illustrations, which is relevant and actionable for brand strategy professionals looking to enhance emotional connections with their audience.