We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sara Fandrey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sara below.
Sara, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
That is a very interesting question, because my job involves being creative pretty much all day long. When I am given a project I must keep my creativity spark alive and it requires a big effort, there are days I can feel that my creativity battery is running low. When that happens I usually pick up a picture book from my favourite illustrator, and I flip through it without really reading it – I focus on the illustrations, on the colours, or on textures.
Sometimes I mindelessly fill a page with paint, letting the brush go up and down without really thinking about anything. I will use these papers in collage at some point anyways and I feel like it is a very cathartic exercise.
Funnily enough Instagram drawing challenges often keep my creativity flowing. I join and host a lot of them because it is a fun way to come up with illustrations by using just two three words, or concepts. We pick a theme, a few prompts, and the combinations of them really sparks my imagination.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Like most artists, I have been drawing since I was a little girl. However I have always studied languages and never really thought of pursuing art as a profession. That changed when Covid hit, and we were all stuck in our homes, baking and knitting. I picked up my brush again and a voice in my head went “This is it. This is what has been missing”. My daughter was 2 years old back then, so I started painting while she was napping, or at night. It felt so good to be drawing again. I joined lots of online classes and courses, in order to properly learn watercolours and gouache. In 2020 I joined the Picture Book Academy “Ars in Fabula”, located in Italy (I was in Germany at the time). Thanks to Covid they were running online classes and I loved it so much I ended up doing two years with them. They did not teach me how to draw or paint, they gave me the tools of how to make a picture book. And that’s where I fell in love with children’s books.
I worked hard and started posting online and slowly the first projects started rolling in. I went to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair twice and I feel like that really opened my eyes on the world of children’s publishing.
Today I am lucky enough to have worked with publishers from all over the world, and I am so honoured to be able to say that my series “I Detective delle Stagioni” (The Detectives of the Seasons? I am trying to manifest an English translation of the books!) written and illustrated by me just came out in September 2025 with Mondadori, a big Italian publisher. A real dream come true for an illustrator.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think one quality would be persistence, never give up. Even though this passion drives me daily, there have been days and rejections that really left a mark. but I picked myself up and kept going, essentially because there was nothing I loved as much and was not going to give up on illustration. The difference between people who make it and don’t make it (and I am not saying I “made it”, I am really starting out) is their determination to keep going. Even when it’s hard.
As far as the skill goes, I would say drawing from life. Having a sketchbook and just drawing whatever you see, people, objects, nature. That helps with finding your “style”, your own way of seeing things and reproducing them on paper.
One area of knowledge that made the difference would be learning from picture books. I buy a lot of them because I do not have a library where I live, and also I like to support artists. Learning about the history of picture books, the famous ones and the contemporary ones, and filling your eyes with good children’s books teaches you the importance of composition, the weight the text has on the page, the unsaid and unwritten. It is fundamental for me.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
Impostor syndrome. Living in the age of social media, where billions of images from artists all over the world are just at your finger tips 24/7 makes it so hard. You constantly compare yourself to others, you compare your achievement to others’ and you wonder if you will ever be as good, as successful. Even though I have achieved so much and I am so proud of how far I have come I often think: I will never be THAT good.
How to get out of it? Turn off social media.
I constantly have to remind myself that we all started somewhere, we were all looking up to someone at some point, even the professionals, the real deal, illustrators who are world famous and are translated in all the languages. Even they have self doubt and compare themselves to others.
It is normal, it is ok and most importantly it is human. The most important thing is not let it come in the way of doing the work.
So next time you have these thoughts, put your phone away, grab a pencil and start drawing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sarafandreyillustrations.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarafandrey_illustrations
Image Credits
all images are mine
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
