Kathrin Schärer: Switzerland ★ Illustrator

“You can portray emotions better with animals.”

Kathrin Schärer

Kathrin Schärer was born in Basel in 1969. She originally trained in both art and education, and currently works in a school for children with speech difficulties. Her career as a picture book illustrator began when she was looking for an Easter book for her niece, but could only find “kitschy bunny stories,” and so she decided to make her own. The characters of Schärer’s books are animals, and anthropomorphized animals at that. She avoids becoming kitschy or overly sweet by using her animal characters to express a fuller range of emotions. Using not only their facial expressions and body postures, but also their ears, beaks, feathers fur, and tails to express the complex interiority of the animal character, she contends, “You can portray emotions better with animals.”

Schärer uses a collage technique to create her animal characters. First she selects a muted shaded paper and then works into the cutout shape of the animal with ink and colored pencils to create a fully textured individual. The backgrounds are created using soft crayons and wax; occasionally watercolors are applied in broad washes. The results retain their three-dimensional element and tactile appeal.

Schärer is not the sole author of all her books. She has teamed up with Lorenz Pauli on a number of occasions to produce joint works, and has also illustrated the comic short works of the nominee for the author prize, Franz Hohler, in Es war einmal ein Igel [There was once a Hedgehog]. Her books with Pauli are full collaborations as his ideas and her images are developed in parallel.

Schärer’s own texts tend not to follow quite such straightforward plot patterns. For instance, in So War Das! Nein, so! Nein so! [It was like this! No it wasn’t! No it wasn’t!], Bear, Badger and Fox disagree on how the tower they were building came to fall down. The result can be read as a simple didactic story on playing nicely, but is also an introduction to the variation in narrative perspective.

Schärer pushes her young readers into more complex narrative devices in her metafictional picture book, Johanna im Zug [Johanna in the Train]. The story playfully invites readers into the world of making books as they start with a black and white sketch of the artist’s work table as she faces the blank page. The majority of Schärer’s twenty picture books have been or are currently being translated into other languages.