On his 30th birthday, Rafael Mantesso’s wife decided to end their marriage and take everything from him including furniture, cookware, decorations and their photos. Luckily, she didn’t take Jimmy Choo, the former couple’s bull terrier named after her favorite shoe designer.
Instead of sinking into depression, the artist used his best friend and the blank walls of his empty apartment in Brazil to create something stunning. At one point, when Jimmy collapsed in happy exhaustion next to the blank canvass, Mantesso found himself grabbing a marker and drawing a completely new world around his pup.
“Suddenly, I felt his long-dormant inspiration for drawing, for art, for life—returning,” Mantesso wrote in BORED PANDA.
Nowadays, Mantesso, who resides in the municipality of Carangola, spends most of his spare time snapping photos of his five-year-old dog, whom he places alongside cartoons he sketched.
With Mantesso’s talent for sketching and Jimmy Choo’s charms, the pair comes up with dozens of funny images in which the bull terrier is portrayed as a superhero, an angel, a rockstar, a cow, and even as Maleficient. The artist also made his pooch appear as if he is taking part in a couple of unusual activities.
A photo posted by @rafaelmantesso on
Speaking to The Daily Mail UK, Mantesso revealed: “Taking pictures and creating art with Jimmy is my hobby, but it’s so great that I have to time to play with Jimmy, who is my best friend.”
According to him, his main motivation to snap the strange photos is to show people that the bull terrier, contrary to people’s perception, is a “lovely and inspirational” breed of dog.
Not surprisingly, the footwear brand Jimmy Choo took notice of Mantesso’s masterpiece. Captivated by the photos he took, Jimmy Choo’s creative director Sandra Choi asked him to create a series of illustrations to decorate a number of the brand’s accessories.