Zelda & Marco

How did your weekly meetings develop into an artistic collaboration, and do you remember the first wordplay illustration you created together?

We were both thinking of making watercolors simply as a hobby. Very quickly, we decided to illustrate wordplays as something light-hearted and funny. Joking together is key in a friendship and to see which puns are landing with others is something interesting. It forced us to make sure we had a clear to depict with our illustrations. The first wordplay we drawn is “à led” : it is a mix between an SOS French message “à l’aide” and the LED lightbulbs. This drawing, like many others, is based on homophonic sound. Both sound the same but have very different meanings.

Zelda & Marco | Bar S’Accouda

How does your work as teachers influence the way you listen to language? Have classroom conversations or students’ interpretations ever inspired a drawing?

Of course, to be teacher of French language and literature helps us. We pay attention to the language and its daily use, especially in our classroom when we have to explain different meanings and uses of words. Some ideas do come from our students. One example is “avoir quelqu’un dans les patte” which is an idiom for “to be in one’s way/to be underfoot” but if you omit one letter from “pattes” to “pate” it means “pasta”: thus the drawing is a guy in someone’s pastas plate. It is also a state of mind: we took the habit of paying attention to what people tell us and it became a kind of game. Even our families and friends suggest wordplays to illustrate.

How do you create a piece together, from the initial joke to the finished illustration? Do you have distinct roles, or does the process change with each work?

We don’t have distinct roles because we are both drawing but Zelda is better than Marco and Marco brings more wordplays. Each week, we discuss the drawings and their details, we agree on a clear and funny drawing, sometimes by asking someone else to see if it is understandable. It is very joyful to see how an idea brings something and becomes a drawing. On top of that, since two years, we no longer live in the same country. Our drawings projects help keep a strong bond between us.

Zelda & Marco | Battre Carte

What makes a French word or expression particularly promising for an illustration? How do you decide which ideas are worth developing?

We take several kinds of things to illustrate: a complete French idiom like “Il pleut des cordes” which corresponds to the English idiom “its raining cats and dogs” but literally means “it is raining ropes”. Sometimes we just take two homophonic words that can be easily illustrated like “poulet” which means “chicken” and “pou laid” which sounds exactly the same and means “ugly louse”. It is remembering us the richness and also oddities of French language, especially for non-speaking persons. A “poulet” is also slang for “policeman”. We try to add these three meanings in our drawing. Sometimes we just change a word in an expression. For example, “Le poids de la victoire” become “Le pois de la victoire”. The first expression means “the weight of victory” as to be victorious can be hard to handle and comes at a price. Without the letter “d”, the word is becoming “pois”: it is the same sound but not the same meaning. The “pois” means “peas”: so we drawn a peas on a podium…

Zelda & Marco | Pou Laid

Your drawings combine soft washes of colour, expressive characters, and handwritten text. How did this visual style develop, and what does it bring to your humour?

We play with framing, sizes and scales to make our ideas understandable without losing complexity. We often discuss the title: do we have to put it or not? Do people understand without the title or the original expression. We want to have the audience try to find all the references and declinations in the initial expressions through the drawing.

Zelda & Marco | Couler Un Bronze

Since your work relies on the sounds and multiple meanings of French words, how do you approach sharing it with viewers who do not speak French?

Actually, we didn’t really think about making it accessible for non-French speaker, it seems so easy to think about pun with French words because there are so many words which look or sound similarly but mean totally something else. We also like to play with collective representation related to French culture, which could be more accessible to English speakers. On another hand, we like the same kind of English content on social medias so maybe one day we’ll think about more “inclusive” ideas but to be honest, we should improve our English practice.

Zelda & Marco | Guide Du Retard

How has your understanding of each other’s humour changed through working together? Can you recall an idea that became stronger because you initially saw it differently?

Working together really helped, we probably wouldn’t continue by our own. From Zelda’s perspective, without advice and ideas from Marco, she wouldn’t keep drawing puns, she’s a real source of inspiration. Moreover, we think that some of our drawings we imagine together coming with one pun initially became something else because one of us said “Great and we could add this and that”. The downside of this process is that some drawings become understandable only to us, but we could say it makes our friendship stronger.