ALI LIMENTANI ILLUSTRATION
OTHER PROJECTS
Here are some other projects I've been working on lately using a range of techniques. Please click on the pink titles to find out more.
Doggy Language' is a series of educational images that show how a dog respond to a threat. The images show how the subtlety of the initial responses develop into overtly aggressive behaviour, ending in with a bite.
These images were developed with the 'Hands On' education department at Wood Green - The Animals Charity and are being used as part of their education program. The charity are very pleased with the images, in their words the images are 'fantastic and have surpassed all of our expectations'.
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Dog safety is a really important issue and one that I feel very strongly about. As a veterinary nurse in an animal shelter I regularly have to euthanise dogs that have bitten. These aren’t random stray dogs, they are family pets! Around 80% of all dog bites to children in the UK are from a familiar dog and unfortunately the majority of them are to the hands or face because of a child’s diminutive height and the way they approach dogs.
Dogs use a series of subtle signals to communicate to us when they are feeling uncomfortable, these can be as slight as blinking, lip licking or turning their heads away from us but will escalate to growling, snapping and biting if we do not take appropriate action by removing the child from the dog. Repeatedly ignoring this behaviour will force the dog to escalate more quickly towards aggression. In a lot of cases parents will punish dogs for growling at their child, further pushing the animal towards overt aggression without warning.
Unfortunately once these communication behaviours have been inadvertently trained out of the dog by the owner, it is too dangerous to re-home and heartbreakingly has to be put to sleep. I would love to teach people how to read these signals and help them to avoid these situations in the future.
I decided to do a biographical piece about my Grandfather’s experiences on the Arandora Star during WWII. Being Italian and Jewish my grandfather moved to the UK at the start of the war, where he found employment with the BBC as a translator and announcer as part of the British War effort. Sadly, when Italy declared war a huge number of Italian migrants were interned and my grandfather was one of them.
After being kept in a horse box at Lingfield Racecourse for a couple of weeks he boarded the Arandora Star destined for an internment camp in Canada. The ship had been a luxury cruse liner prior to the war but had been painted grey, armed and lacking humanitarian markings such as a red cross to show that it was carrying prisoners of war. It was targeted and sunk by a German U-Boat causing many of the men to perish in the icy waters. Luckily my grandfather lived to tell the tail, but there is still a lot of sadness sounding the even and how it was portrayed by British propaganda past and present. Families are angry not only to have lost relatives in this way, but also because they have not been remembered formally, the entire event seemingly being swept under the carpet.
Exploring at Gesner’s encyclopedia of animals with the children in the zoo’s library during the summer art course has inspired a new idea for some prints. The wood cut prints in the book were created from descriptions of the animals or poorly taxidermied specimens, which often bared little resemblance to the living creature. I love the idea of creating images using only the description so I made a few of my own!
When I designed my first font, it was out of necessity, I couldn’t find anything that suited the character of my first book ’40 Elephants’ so I made quite a heavy set collographs font, which I call Font ONE. This font has divided opinions, some really like it, others feel that it is too bold and detracts from my prints so I decided to redesign it, using vinyl cut letters, called Font THREE. In the mean time I also designed a digital upper case alphabet for the credits of my brother’s award winning short film ‘Put Down’.
