Born of two friends from Kingston University, The Marjory Project is an illustration collective headed by first year Kingston students Matthew Robinson and Dale Crosby Close. The Marjory Project - lovingly anthropomorphized as “Marjory,” whom Dale and Matt call “a little bit cheeky” - is an illustration tumblr composed entirely of Dale and Matt’s artistic renderings of requested themes or concepts from Marjory Project fans.

Each illustration is labelled with it’s original request, resulting in a fantastic layout of the call and response process as the illustrators whisk the request away into a hilarious tangent of imagination. Often, a chatty and entirely unpunctuated explanation is provided, Matt and Dale’s matter-of-fact tone serving the perfect frame for their absurd humor. Take, for example, Marjory’s answer to “a drunk mermaid”:

Dale follows his work with some context, explaining:

“the biggest misconception about ‘maids are that they are actually no bigger than a human finger… so thats why they always accidentally find themselves in peoples drinks and where the famous saying ‘there’s a mermaid in your beer’ comes from”.

Ahh yes, the age-old saying about thumb-sized mermaids and beers. 

                                          (“bane of my existence”)

Another favorite is Matt’s notion of the “man who shares his house with hundreds of cacti”: 

Matt explains that Cheaper by the Dozen’s Steve Martin finds himself home alone again, “leaving him to handle a new job and a unstable amount of cacti” in a home now filled with more cacti than human children.

Here, Elvis dirties his floor with a fish dinner:

And so on and so forth. The Marjory Project is a fantastic laugh - I’m hoping to come up with my own request worthy of Matt and Dale’s imagination. If you’d like to see more of their personal work, you can find Matt here, or Dale, over here.

- Maggie