Illustrating Sprig the Rescue Pig
I have always been illustrating in a way, even though I didn’t call it that yet. I have always filled my school books with little doodles, and crafted presents and greeting cards for family and friends. It was in college when I really started to think about illustration as a career. Combining my passion for drawing, with my passion for telling stories felt so much more appealing and fitting than anything else I could imagine at that time.
To improve my skills in visual expression I started to keep a graphic diary. My goal was to express a feeling or an idea and to come to terms with my day-to-day-life.
Mind you, I was quite young at that point so there was a lot of emotion going on inside me, while I was trying to figure out the world and people around me. I hardly ever showed the pictures to anyone so I could draw without feeling the need to be perfect. I just wanted to pin down the way I was feeling in one little sketch.
Now I get hired for projects with precisely that goal: to evoke feeling. To make illustrations everyone can relate to emotionally. To tell someone's story in pictures.
There are so many things I love about illustration, I can’t really say what I like most. Every stage has it’s really wonderful moments. At first there is just this blank page, a void to fill, and I start to research the story or the topic. I learn a lot of other things this way as well. With Sprig, I'm learning about pigs and how they live.
It’s exactly that: getting to know the character. It doesn’t really feel like I am making things up, but more like it is already there, somewhere, waiting for me to bring it out and make it live on the page. I am following cues and ideas trying to find the perfect fit for the story.
And suddenly there is something alive on my page. Someone I'm very close to. This is very fulfilling, the whole process of it, including the struggles.
Sprig drew me in because it shows that in a lot of ways we are treating animals not the way they deserve it. Animals need to be respected and considered worthy. They feel and know much more than some of us think. Pigs are actually very clever. I like showing through this book that a pig is about so much more than bacon.
Sonja Stangl, an illustrator based in Vienna, Austria, breathed life into Sprig the Rescue Pig, a book that has since achieved acclaim for its sympathetic portrait of a little pig who accidentally escapes from a factory farm, and finds happiness with a little girl named Rory.
Food awareness is a big topic and I think it would be good to know what you eat, where it comes from, and what goes into producing it.
Growing up in the countryside, I knew how the food on my plate got there, from small and friendly farms around our home. I don’t think everyone needs to be vegetarian, but I think it would be good for the world if more people just stopped for a moment to think about what goes into making that meal. Sprig makes you think about it.