In December I was walking around Anthropologie grasping for any kind of Christmas present inspiration for my sister and mom. Gosh was Christmas 2014 an uninspiring time. Anyways, a bright red book caught my eye. It was a large compilation of M. Sasek's books about countries around the world call This is the World. I resisted the urge to buy it right then (I was looking for presents for other people) but still bought it off Amazon as soon as I got home. It's a beautiful book. You probably already know that I love illustrating buildings, and there are only a few artists like M. Sasek who draw architecture with such style!
From him I'm going to steal:
- Repetition: He often repeats items for effect
- Scale: Size is exaggerated on both ends (small and big)
- Humor: He was one clever guy!
- Ordinary Life: His best illustrations are those that depict the oddities of ordinary life
- Perspective: To play on scale and humor, he painted from a different perspective, often from above, or really far away, or had layers of foreground, middle ground and background and even back-background
- Detail: tons and tons of layers of detail. I can't imagine how long it took him to finish a book!