Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Pros and cons of being an illustrator.
Definitely the main pro, the biggest one, is that my passion became
my job and I can do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
I can follow my passion freely.
The main con is that I think about illustration 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and this passion
never leaves me alone.
This way private life, family and friends are affected by that situation.
Sometimes you decide not to go out one time to carry on a project and these are sacrifices
that one makes happily.
Another important pro I have experienced during these years and that depends from the fact I am an illustrator
who works mostly in digital,
is that I can work everywhere I go and this makes you very open minded,
and does not make you feel yourself caged in a profession that forces you to live always
in the same place.
I have the opportunity to explore the world around me and all these things are reflected
in my illustrations.
When I have to find inspiration for a work, I gain it from what I already know, from what is called
collective imagination or from the things the publisher gives me as reference points.
If editors propose me a book where I can experiment a new style or try something different,
or I feel the necessity of changing my way of working because I do not want to propose
the usual style/technique,
generally I look at a personal picture archive I have been preparing throughout the course
of the years or I look at Internet, that offers you many sources of inspiration
in a short time.
Furthermore, I have been collecting a very big personal library of children's books.
I would like to make a book entirely mine, both text and illustrations,
And I have a notebook where I have written all the ideas for that book.
I just have to find some time to complete it, to prepare it, to study the book structure from a technical point of view,
choosing the type of paper, the page setting, the format, and so on.
These are all things that require a long and hard work, so I need to take some time
to do it.
Recently, I also saw that some illustrators applied their illustrations
to textiles and I found that very interesting.
When I have some free time and I want to relax,
I cook.
Often some of my illustrations are inspired or influenced by food.
I think that it depends also from the fact I am a gourmand,
I love good food and I also like cooking it.
I love cooking. I enjoy it very much but sometimes I like to take food theme
theme in my illustrations, making it funny and likeable.
[music]
My secret dream is not so particular, it could just be having the
opportunity of doing my job for all my life, until I
will be old.
As for authors and illustrators, I have no famous names to mention.
In the course of the years I found a beautiful group of illustrator friends, all of them very talented,
great, whom I highly appreciate.
Some of them are among De Dominicis Agency's artists, like Gloria Pizzilli, Riccardo Guasco,
Simone Massoni -- who is also my husband -- and Gianluca Folì.
I really would like to collaborate with them, firstly because they are brilliant, gifted
and secondly because they are very important to me, they are good friends.
Apart from my appreciation for them as artists, there is a special feeling with these people and
the project that could come out through this collaboration could be surely very interesting.