Many meanings of an illustration.
It is not easy to define what an illustration is.
We could define it as an image that can be reproduced in many copies and that essentially serves to explain a text, to make it explicit, to clarify it to those who read the book, precisely, illustrated.
Is an illustrator also an artist? Can an artist be an illustrator?
It is not clear where the line between artist and illustrator ends and often the two professional figures are mixed.
Pop Art has created very colourful images, Expressionism has created satirical illustrations and caricatures.
But not only Illustrations created with drawing throughout the twentieth century, also created with clippings of photographs, with collage.
And today you also use only the computer or integrate traditional drawing with the computer.
Illustration in Posters
Persuading people to buy a specific product, to vote for a party or a political figure: the illustration on the posters is posted on city walls and shows the most rhetorical side of propaganda or its most inviting side if it is advertising a product.
The illustration here is a vehicle for specific messages, not just a thought. It has to convince, it has to change the viewer’s mind.
Illustrations on book covers
Illustrating book covers was inevitable when books began to be printed for a larger audience.
Only with a gradual process over the years was it possible to think that the cover of a book could best present and describe the content of the book.
Illustration in the books
Children’s illustration has played a key role in children’s books. From the nineteenth century onwards, children’s books have reached remarkable artistic levels, enriching and completing famous texts or making famous texts that would not have had a large audience without them.
I remember books and texts more for the illustrations that accompanied them.
Illustration in adult books
Actually, I don’t think there is such a clear separation between children’s books and adult books.
A text for any age can be accompanied by images, but perhaps for those who are older, there is more freedom in the techniques and approach to the text.
Over the years we have probably lost the habit of accompanying adult books with illustrations.
One prefers to create comic books rather than enriching books with illustrations.
What is an illustration today?
An illustration is a drawing that tells us something and accompanies a text.
But there are also “silent books” that have no words, they are completely “mute” because they have no text, they are the illustrations that tell the story.
The illustration works as both image and text, it does not distinguish between children and adults, it is understood and perceived by everyone.
The illustrations to download and print
In the age of extreme reproducibility, drawing and then transforming the original illustration into a file is a way to spread one’s art with minimal expense to the buyer.
These are high level illustrations but they have no limited edition and therefore can reach a very wide audience.
Of course there is the risk that anyone uses them for commercial purposes, but it is a risk that unfortunately we all run using the web.
My illustrations to download
The illustrations I have on my site, belong to an imaginary world that can be used for everyone’s holidays, to express concepts such as freedom, love, joy, lightness.
They are images suitable for any environment, for any age.
The surreal illustrations that I create, almost always start from an analysis of the News, of something that happened around me. Reality is always at the origin of every illustration of mine.
But the world I illustrate is “outside the real world”.
The landscapes rarely appear behind the characters, almost always they are backgrounds with compact and strong colours. They adapt to a white wall, to a room that needs colour.
The figures in the illustrations are static in the face, drawn in profile with only one eye closed.
I’m inspired by the figures of ancient Egypt that are both frontal and in profile, and make a strong and solid three-dimensional idea.
The only eye is closed because the images are introspective, it is an invitation to those who look at them, to observe themselves inside.
If there is a text, this is reinforced by the “silence” of the face.
My illustrations accentuate a concept that I expressed in words and that appears in a flag, in a sign, that accompanies the figure.
The lonely figures in my illustrations
Few groups, I like solitary figures, but if I have to think of a group, this one has rhythmic and almost equal figures.
The rhythm is given by the figure that repeats itself that differs from another only for some detail.
The World of my Illustrations.
It is a silent illustrated world, made of dancers with their eyes closed, women sitting at the café or walking alone.
A fashion that ranges from the Twenties to the Seventies, with many determined, lively and positive women.
There is irony, sarcasm, sometimes satire, but more often I am inspired by Gorey’s black humor and that timeless world that belongs to the past but speaks to our present.
What I illustrate today
Every sometimes a publishing house allows me to create some book cover with my own illustration and this makes me very happy, because reading a text and then trying to condense in a cover the meaning of a book, is a great challenge.
I then had a daily comic on a page on facebook in Italian, which I’ve been moving on instagram for a few months.
It’s about La Signorina Illustratrice. Social satire on the wretched and underpaid world of illustrators.
This cartoon had a good audience on Facebook for three years but then I closed after publishing a book with some comics.
I am currently free from any contractual obligations and I am illustrating my thoughts on Instagram and Facebook, and many of those illustrations are now in the Do it Yourself section of my site.
Other illustrations will soon be printed on unique scarves for a very young fashion line.
For all the others, all that remains is to spend a few euros to get a funny and ironic illustration directly from the site.
What to do with them? greeting cards, labels to decorate gift packages, print them and frame them in your home.
There are no limits really, the only prohibition is to spread them to sell them, to appropriate the copyright, to break the pact with the author, which allows you to use them but only for personal use.
Friends, I know you respect my work, thank you!
