My name is Sara, I am a 30-something Italian born children's book illustrator living simultaneously in the little world inside my head and in Portugal - on Planet Earth.
One of my very first memories from my childhood is me, sitting in the waiting room of the hospital while my sister was being born, drawing big headed lions.
Growing up I have always found myself drawing or painting, but always as a hobby and never as a profession.
I took a long break from messing around with paint only after my daughter was born in 2018.
In 2020, being stuck home like the rest of world, I picked up a brush again and a voice in my head whispered "this is what has been missing". I haven't let go of that brush (neither traditional nor digital) until now, and I don't anticipate doing it any time soon.
I then signed up on a bunch of online classes on watercolour painting and in 2021 I took the plunge and enrolled in the Entry Level Course with the Italian Picture Book Academy, Ars in Fabula. It is there and then that I fell in love with picture books. The following year, in 2022, I signed up for the Advanced Level Class at the same school, where I got the privilege to meet some of the today's most talented children's book illustrators.
In school, I have learned how to narrate through images, how to build a functioning storyboard, how to illustrate around the text, and how to complement it with pictures, drawing what was written between the lines. I have learned the importance of experimenting, I was given the tools to look for my own artistic voice.
My biggest dream today is to illustrate my own picture book, to make this dream a profession, to be able to make a living off my drawings and off this big, little world and its colourful characters that take up so much wonderful space in my head, patiently waiting to be shared with the rest of the world.
