Sara Fanelli - Children's Book Illustrator

Sara Fanelli, originally from Florence, is a children’s book illustrator who moved to London in 1990 to study. Her experimental, ephemeral style has given her the spotlight in more recent years as one of the UK’s most sought after Illustrators. Using Collage, photo-montage, hand-lettering and freeing materials such as pen or brush and ink, she creates dream-like, surreal images. Her work covers a wide variety of literature and printed media, something that the artist has been very passionate about since her early childhood.

Study Number One

My first study inspired by Fanelli saw me delve into the vast world of collage, something that is very prolific in her illustrative work. On a slightly creased piece of graph paper, I inked a distorted, blurry body, later adding a large number of eyes, an ear and some legs using some black and white photocopies and a scrap of brown paper.  In the foreground of the image I added a torn piece of map paper for my two cowering victims to hide behind and a hand-written piece of text. I am happy with this image as it directly references a number of Fanelli’s illustrative habits; her creation of surreal fictional creatures and her use of collage, particularly with the use of the graph paper.

Study Number Two

My second study saw me once again breaking out the ink. This time I lay down a base colour of a mustardy yellow, a colour that Fanelli seems particularly infatuated with. Onto this I collaged the oven surface and the pot of food, later inking in the ends of the surface and the flames from beneath the pot. I then drew the rather dead-eyed chef using a thin paintbrush. I read in an interview with the artist that her drawings are made with a brush. She said "It's bolder than a pen and I like to allow the mark itself to suggest the direction the drawing should take” [1] so this is why I used this tool specifically. After this drawing was made I then added the collaged phrase, as a humorous touch. I noticed that she uses a lot of strange questions and sayings in her work so I decided to add one to this to tie the image together. 

Study Number Three

This study got a little bit weird. Reverting back to my original study, I decided to create another bizarre creature, this time opting for collage as my only technique. I took to a small fashion magazine looking for eyes and hair. I knew roughly that I wanted it to be a hairy monster but how I got to him/her would be something that I discovered along the way. In an interview with ‘Books for Keeps’ Fanelli mentioned that she ‘very much liked the element of chance and freedom that the process of creating a collage brings to a picture’ [2]. Whilst I also found in a similar article from Varoom magazine that she does ‘plan a general composition, so that she has a guide for her ‘happy mistakes’ ’ [3]. Similarly I had no idea what the end product would look like with this collage but the elements that I found resulted in what I would definitely refer to as a ‘happy mistake’, even if it was a rather odd one.

Study Number Four

For my final study I decided to tackle some subject matter that wouldn’t be too far from something Fanelli herself would illustrate. Using some of my spare collage eyes and a couple of chunky marker pens I interpreted the famous tale of the pied piper. In hindsight I think that the use of the eyes as rats, gives the piece a really surreal, almost sinister effect. Although given the work that Fanelli has produced before, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In one interview she said ‘There is an element of playfulness in the surreal side of things that is fundamental for me’ [], and I really think that shows in her work and the materials she uses to produce it. As well as reverting back to the trusted technique of collage, I also tried to emulate another area of Fanelli’s work that is quite specific to her. Many of her images lack spatial depth, especially her characters. One method that she uses to do this is by letting them be drawn straight onto the background rather than inking them in, so that the whole figure is filled in with one colour, the same colour as the background behind it. That is why I let the branches of the tree bleed through from underneath the piper’s face. 

References

[1] Carey, 2004.
[2] Robins, 2012.
[3] Heller, 2007

Bibliography

Carey, J. 2004. The Guardian. Dynamic Doodles. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview8

Heller, S. 2007. Graphic Gestures: An interview with Sara Fanelli. Wolves, Logic and Happy Mistakes. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://www.hellerbooks.com/pdfs/varoom_03.pdf

Robins, G. 2012. Books for Keeps. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/195/childrens-books/articles/the-dream-like-images-of-sara-fanelli

Chris Ware - Comic Artist

Chris Ware is an American writer, cartoonist and graphic novelist. His simplified, pictorial illustrations capture the lives of his own original characters, often covering dark and sensitive subject matter. 

Study Number One

This was the first study that I started and the last one that I worked on. This was inspired by Ware’s use of direction in his framed comics. One such example of this comes in the form of his 1991 creation Quimby the Mouse [1]. Many of the pages in this early nineties comic can be read in multiple direction thanks to the ambiguous illustrative style of Quimby himself and the numerous narrative paths laid out in the images.
I tried to emulate this in my own figures and layout, although my image remains unfinished. With the starting point ‘I’m so bored. How do I get out of here?’ I created a short sequence of simplified frames depicting my attempted escape from my desk in the University of Gloucestershire Illustration Studio. At the start I worked from the top left square to the top right and all the way down to the bottom right square, later added the six frames coming down on the left. I feel as though it has a definite feel of Chris Ware’s pioneering layouts. 

Study Number Two

This was my second attempt at emulating Chris Ware. This was inspired by an image of Ware’s called Big Tex, which you can see here [2]. Big Tex was in turn inspired by Frank King’s series of Sunday pages, Gasoline Alley [3]. King was a particular fan of displaying these pages as an image of a single space (a house, a street, a beach), fragmented by a matrix of panels [4]. 

This style of comic really inspired me creatively and I liked the complexity of designing a similar layout to Ware and King’s. I also tried to capture something rather darker in the narrative of the comic, similar to Ware’s writing style. I wanted to give the impression that something had happened to the daughter character, pictured at different ages throughout the comic, but without being too obvious or blatant. I much prefer the ‘reading between the lines’ part of storytelling.
I hand-drew the image before adding colour using Photoshop. I’m really pleased with how I kept the correct colours throughout the image, electing to add squares of colour with reduced opacities to create tone and mood. 

Study Number Three

My next emulation was once again, hand drawn, this time taking on a much less linear form to the previous two comics. I took inspiration from a page that I found in one of Ware’s Building Stories [4] publications, but was actually in his Acme Novelty Library before that. In the image, the protagonist of Building Stories gives rein to her suicidal thoughts, the complexity of the layout describing her excruciating mental battle [4]. The ambiguous swirling, corner-turning layout really emphasises her anguish and I was inspired by this. At first I found the image really difficult to read, mostly as there isn’t really a ‘right way up’, but when it comes to the mind I suppose there isn’t one for that either, so I feel as though this confusing layout is appropriate.
I decided to use this technique to describe my own daily battle, perhaps a more cheery one; getting out of bed to go to University in the morning. 

Study Number Four

My fourth and final attempt resulted in my only fully digital image. This time I documented my own mundane life using a very limited colour palette and a series of very simplified frames, something that I found Chris Ware does a lot in his work. The way he documents time through very basic events and little or no speech is for the most part what inspired this simple comic. Ware’s comics have been described as a “suggestive description of inner life, of the feeling of time, of memory, of experiencing the world” [4] and I wanted to show that through my own simple memory.
I was also interested in how a lot of his work is quite rhythmic in its layout. Ware is known to have compared his art to music, each frame representing a beat or note in a melody. This is why I have separated my frames the way I have. Two large frames and then four smaller frames repeated over and over, giving the image somewhat of a balance and a flow.
I’m really pleased with how this piece worked out as I am not the most confident person in digital media and this was probably the emulation that took the shortest amount of time to make.

References

[1] klarelijninternational.midiblogs.com, 2015.
[2] hoodedutilitarian.com, 2015.
[3] theperiodicfable.files.wordpress.com, 2015.
[4] Bartual, 2012.

Bibliography

Bartual, R. 2012. Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJOCA) Volume 1:1. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://sjoca.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/SJoCA-1-1-Article-Bartual.pdf

King, F. 1918. Image from Gasoline Alley. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: https://theperiodicfable.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/gasoline-alley-1.jpg

Ware, C. 1990-1991. Image from Quimby the Mouse. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://klarelijninternational.midiblogs.com/media/00/01/411625023.jpg

Ware, C. 1996. Image of Big Tex from Acme Novelty Library. [Online] [Accessed from 2015] Available from: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Big-Tex.jpg