Sunday Spread Week 8: The World is Round.

'The world is round, like an orange." -Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Hello! It’s Lea again.

I hope you had a great week. If you don’t know me, it's nice to meet you! This is Sunday Spreads, my personal illustration challenge. I try to make one picture book spread per week based on childhood memories.

This week I wanted to push myself to explore different compositions and formats. I remember I used to love using round cardboard tubes like a Longview. So as I was preparing this week’s illustration, I played around again with a round cardboard tube letting my eye wander around the room. And I love how you can really feel your eye auto-focusing on different subjects to different depths of field. ( Of couse this is something my eyes do everyday all the time, but I take that completely for granted…Eyes are great cameras.)

So for the illustration, I tried to set myself a setting, like a typical winter day on a beach in Normandy with my family. I remember walking for hours, looking for the best seashell with my siblings, with the sharp, salty wind on our faces and a promise of a waffle covered in salt butter caramel. Here is the final illustration, and you can read more bout the process below:

On the start of my circular framing journey, I discovered a video from the Vox YouTube Channel about the birth of personal photography, and one of the first popular Kodak camera had only round framing like pictured below.

I love these pictures, the roundness of the image invites you in, these ancient snapshots are not just a great testimony of the past and early age of photography, They are also a question on design and the way we frame images: Why did we settle on rectangular framing?

But there are of course great example of circle format in art, from ancient manuscripts to graphic novels, like Chris Ware: my favorite comic book artist discovery of last year. He is an American comic artist, famous for I would say realistic documentary graphic novels, and I am pretty convinced that circle is his favorite shape. From the perfectly round faces of his characters to his deconstructed round compositions like on this cover of Rusty Brown.

Circle compositions allows a sort of peeping perspective like a character from far with a Longview, or up close through the round lens of a microscope. Which goes perfectly with the narration of the author, as Chris Ware likes to go very close to his characters and explore every little painful detail of their humanhood, and very far, as if to contextualise the narrative, like a scientist surveying his experiment, demonstrating that this is just one character in one room, in one flat, in one building, in one street, in one city, in one country, on one round little planet… until the reader feels very small. It can be a painful read (and it’s written in a really small font) but Chris Ware gives so much freedom to the reader as many pages don’t have an imposed order of reading. You’re free to wander around the page and the story, which is really rewarding, and that experience stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Here is the animated trailer of Rusty Brown, If you like graphic novels, I fully recommend it !

And of course Wes Anderson has used circular framing, playing with the round windows on the submarine in The Life Aquatic:

And on these beautiful frames of The Grand Budapest Hotel:

Coming to the illustration process : I started with a simple sketch on paper, trying to find interesting composition and story:

Taking this into procreate for rough draft:

And the final painting directly on the rough :

Let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to reach out, I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.

(Dammit Kermit, that’s a square, not a circle)

See you next week !

Lea