Interview with Illustrator Jared Muralt

Interview with a talented Swiss artist

Mai 14th, 2015, 12:04 pm

Jared is a freelance illustrator from Bern and the co-founder of the BlackYard Studio a Swiss design collective. Despite a whole year in art school, Jared has ended up being an autodidact, finding his own style in the stippling technique. We decided to ask him more about his career, what inspires him and his projects in this interview.


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print24: Jared, we first discovered your work through the drawings in your sketchbook. When did you start filling your first sketchbook with illustrations and how many of those do you have?

Jared: I believe I started in my earliest years when my mom offered me my first sketchbook. Before, I used to draw Sci-fi-inspired arts in cheap notepads without even thinking about the beauty, the necessity of a convincing artwork nor the academic rules. Drawing in a real sketchbook was an entirely different story. Even the cover and the paper quality had a rather serious impact on me. I tried to draw pages after pages but didn’t succeed as I couldn’t find my own working rhythm. I didn’t stop at this one sketchbook and tried again but I never went over half of it.

I later discovered how I should carry on drawing in a sketchbook. I then taught myself how to draw without taking what I was producing too seriously. This may be the reason why I hardly ever sketched but go directly inking. What makes the life of an artist is the mistakes he or she makes. For me, this sketchbook is a daily artbook, an experimental place, a factory of ideas and a playground all-together.

I don’t know how many sketchbooks I already fully filled but at the moment I’m doing between two to three sketchbooks per year.

For me, this sketchbook is a daily artbook, an experimental place, a factory of ideas and a playground all-together.“

print24: where do you get your inspiration from? Do you always carry a notepad or a sketchbook with you or are your projects rather conceptual?

Jared: I let myself drifting away from my surroundings. That’s when things start to inspire me. I draw the ideas or images that comes to my mind as well as the situations, the people, the landscapes I meet on my road. And yes, I’m hardly leaving my home without a pen or a sketchbook. Those are spontaneous moments where I capture the drawing and then implements it into a more conceptual project.


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print24: the incredible style of your drawings is stunning and feels so exceptional and unique. Have you ever had a preference for rather graphic images or did your style develop itself bit by bit through a long progress?

Jared: yes, I was fond of comics and such related imagery when I was a kid. This influence has probably followed me until today and my enthusiasm about it has yet not decreased. Nevertheless, I have always been and still am in a constant development.

print24: you have a project closely related to your name called „Tiefsee Angler“ (Deep Sea Angler). How did you come to draw deep sea fishes and what made you so enthusiastic about it?

Jared: the oddness of these animals completely mesmerized me. Their frightening and deformed appearance full of warts. Moreover, those fishes lure their prey in the darkness of the deeps with a little light over their heads. This light is produced in symbiosis with a luminous bacteria. The shape and form of these animals were perfect to practice the stippling technique. Therefore, I started to draw one of those fishes every day.

After I had drawn roughly 50 different fishes, I had the idea to create and publish an illustrated book. This ended up as a work of more than 100 illustrations of deep sea angler fishes with a little description for each species.

the oddness of these animals completely mesmerized me. Their frightening and deformed appearance full of warts.

print24: in addition to your sketchbook drawings and illustrations, you also created some flyers as well as doing some clients‘ requests. You also have the BlackYard Studio, your own design collective. What does a typical day looks like in the life of Jared Muralt?

Jared: together with my three friends Christian Calame, Philipp Thoeni and Silvio Brügger, I have founded this collective of design and illustration in 2009. Everybody had something special to bring to the team. That said, we are two illustrators and two graphic designers benefiting from each other in this set-up. There is no typical work day, but there are at least three: the first one is probably the more pleasant.

If I’m not totally stressed out, I go between 8 to 9 hours outside the house. For lunch, everyone of us cooks. After that, we play 8 rounds of Mariokart and then the work can begin. We check and reply to our emails, work on things we’re pushing up for weeks or simply draw something. Then there are days when I’m not drawing a single line, handling the office work, supervising our online shop – which, to our delight, has developed a very turbulent life of its own over the years. We even had to hire an assistant.
And then you have those days when I’m stressed in my office, working the entire day and half of the night on a project until I could fall asleep.


Thank you Jared for this great interview! If you want to discover more of his incredible work, have a look at his Behance profile or just dropped by his Instagram account!

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