Júlia Sardà Portabella

Catalan illustrator Júlia Sardà Portabella made The Liszts in 2016 and found an international audience. Gouache and pencil keep a grain digital polish cannot. Gothic rooms and a dry joke share the page. She wants the picture to continue the writer’s story, not decorate it.

Sardà’s process is an exercise in intuitive archaeology. For The Liszts—Kyo Maclear’s tale of a list-obsessed family—she began by sketching characters “without constraints,” allowing their idiosyncrasies to emerge through pencil strokes. “If I capture their standing plain characters,” she explains, “the atmosphere follows.” Her Liszts embody anachronistic elegance: Eastern European silhouettes draped in Victorian textures, existing outside temporal logic yet vibrating with emotional truth. This approach reflects her core philosophy: illustration should “continue the writer’s story,” adding layers of meaning through visual metaphor.

Her technical approach is equally distinctive. Rejecting digital perfectionism, Sardà employs traditional mediums to build tactile richness—layers of gouache and pencil creating depths that pixel-perfect rendering cannot replicate. Yet she remains refreshingly candid about challenges: typography, she admits, is a “pending subject,” often resolved through inspired “borrowing” from other artists.

What sets Sardà apart is her reverence for ambiguity. Whether depicting a listless Sunday or a mysterious visitor (the narrative heart of The Liszts), she invites viewers into in-between rooms where the uncanny can still feel like home. This talent extends beyond children’s literature; her illustrations for Linda Bailey's Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein (2018) promise “watercolor stains and blurry black atmospheres”—a fitting homage to another pioneer of dark imagination.

In an industry that often prefers trend to substance, Sardà keeps faith with slow, intuitive making. As she prepares to explore Shelley’s legacy, the lasting magic is not only in answers, but in questions whispered through brushstrokes.