Inspiration case study: Mareikje Vogler

After analysing an all-time favourite and a recent obsession, for my third “inspiration case study” for Tom Froese’s ‘The Style Class: Work out your illustration style in a daily project’ I felt the need to find inspiration closer to the kind of illustrations I would like to make more of professionally. That is, illustrations of novels (for children / teens, as novels for adults and even older teens are rarely illustrated if at all, except possibly the cover).

In order to get to know the German market better, I have endlessly browsed publishers’ websites, visited various bookshops, and attended the Frankfurter Buchmesse twice. All I’ve come out with was a nauseating feeling of overwhelm 😳️. Publishers always say you should take a look at what they’re selling to find out whether your art would be a good fit, but honestly I never seem to quite find a thread 😅️.

I was surprised at how well focusing instead on individual artists worked! :)

I started with publisher Beltz & Gelberg, more specifically the Gulliver imprint, as I knew they have the kind of illustrations I’m aspiring to make (so the visits to the Frankfurter Buchmesse had not been fruitless after all ;)).

I noted 2 or 3 illustrators I found interesting, looked at their website or/and Instagram if they has one, and looked them up in search engines, generally finding their work at other publishers’. There I also came upon a few more illustrators to look up. I did this on and off over the course of several days, collecting the works in folders dedicated to each illustrator.

The process was still a bit messy and meandering, but I did end up with a concrete and actionable output.

Of course there were several artists I was interested in, but the one I related to most was Mareikje Vogler. Here are some of the things I noticed in her work:

Other illustrators I’ve looked at more or less closely are: Lena Winkel, Anne-Kathrin Behl, Barbara Jung, Regina Kehn, Julia Christians, and Kai Schüttler (slightly obsessing about his work right now 😁️). I’m not going to make detailed studies of all of them though – at least not now, as I want to get to work on the actual illustration project! But they may well be the starting point for later projects :)

Initially I wanted to stick to 3 case studies, but there is one more I feel I can’t leave out. I want to keep it short, so bear with me for another inspiration from the world of comics: Fumio Obata ✨️