toonNews

If you have been surfing toonpool.com in the last three months, you probably stumbled upon Freelah’s weird caricatures. Noseless and milky-eyed they always made me think of some alien invasion force – pod people, those aliens from “They Live!”.. you know the kind. Freelah, whose actual name is Fernando Souza lives on the outskirts of Santo André in the metropolitan area of São Paulo. I just had to ask him about those uncanny portraits…

… so, Fernando, what about those alien characters of yours?

I call them “Toonadas”. My main intention is to simplify the image of a person creating an intermediate stage between realism and an extremely iconic toon like the Toonpool Guy. He also has only outlines for eyes and no nose.

I don’t speak Portuguese or Spanish… Does the Toonada pun refer to “nada” as in “nothing”? To the Armada?

It’s not really a pun. In Portuguese the suffix “-ada” is equivalent to “-ed” in English. When I take a picture of a lady, I say that she has been photographed – fotografada. When I turn a lady into a toon, I say she has been “toonada”. That’s the idea.

Oh, OK.. Back to the caricatures: How did you develop this style?

Starting this project I experimented with the features I would draw “realistically” and the ones I would draw in a more abstract cartoon style. My goal was to keep only the essentials in order for the identity to be recognized. In the end I opted for a result that loses a little in terms of sympathy – I admit that.

Still, I think that this result has two things I admire very much in art: it creates questions and divergence of opinions. I’m very happy when one person calls the toonadas “kind of cute” and another one asks me “Urrrgh … What happened to his eyes?” I am fascinated by this ambiguous property of art, a kind of “not being”.

“Not being”?

An example: You compared my caricatures to aliens. You can only do this because you already knew the image of an “alien” – as usually conceived. Another person who has never seen an alien could not make that comparison. In other words: The toonada image is not an exclamation mark, it is a question mark.

The freedom of interpretation transforms the image into a kind of mirror.. Cute or ugly, similar or weird, funny or boring, eyes without pupils or only the outlines of eyes, zombie, alien, chibi, cartoon, caricature …. you decide.

And I think it works. I have received the most different feedbacks. Some people do not even realize they don’t have noses. They only realize this after reading someone else’s comments. I still surprises me. Of course I am still working on perfecting this model.

What kinds of things did you change over time?

At first I was using only flat colors, then I added shading and reflexes. I also drew the head more in proportion to the body, now I draw it larger. Things like that.

How do you decide on whom to do next?

In my “official” blog, I am filling a grid of sorts. I want to cartoonize one person from each country in the world. This is one criterion of choice. The other criterion is to do a mixture of persons I admire, people who have been in the news recently, historical figures, and suggestions from friends. I hope that after a while, the collection of personalities will be as diverse as the world is.

How many countries did you do, so far?

So far I have 39. Since I do not complete the countries in sequence, it will probably take years until I am done. But I have no hurry. I seek only to ensure that I’m having fun while working on it every day.

There are a few other illustrations of yours on toonpool.com. Have you stopped doing those in favor of the toonadas?

I am glad you mention them! Normally I do this kind of work for publicity purposes. These three were made for art contests. I spent so much time using this kind of paintings for “serious” topics like commerce, horror and fantasy art, but I’m still getting used to using them for humor. In fact, I’m currently working on one of those. I have not stopped because I know I need to improve so much.

Thanks for your time!

Paul Hellmich

© toonpool.com

Tags: alien, caricature, Fernando Souza, Freelah

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 13th, 2010 at 11:10 am and is filed under 2010, Community, Interview, toonpool.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.