A portrait opens onto a landscape. Flowers and animals grow out of a silhouette, and somewhere in the folds a tiny person goes about their business.
Sandra Rilova, an illustrator and animator based in Spain, calls this working in visual metaphors: one image that carries a whole idea.
The pictures look soft at first, but they’re tightly controlled. Flat shapes, crisp edges and grainy gradients let a forest sit inside a cheek without the image turning to mush.
Rilova trained in Fine Arts at the University of Bilbao, then studied illustration at EINA in Barcelona.
Fairy tales run through nearly everything she makes. From 2018 to 2020 she created all of the illustrations for the new Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, Denmark, from The Little Mermaid to The Tinderbox.
The museum, designed by Kengo Kuma, opened in 2021. Kuma said the building borrows Andersen’s trick of a small world suddenly swelling into a much larger one. We can’t think of a better description of Rilova’s work!
Her books lean toward old tales told by unsentimental writers: Perrault’s Donkeyskin, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, and Anne Sexton’s Transformations, the poet’s sharp retellings of the Brothers Grimm.
That last one is the pairing we’d most like to hold in our hands. She has also drawn for The Folio Society, Penguin Random House and Harvard Business Review, and was a finalist at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2022.
See more at sandrarilova.com and on Instagram at @sandrarilova.
