Andrea De Santis was born in Brescia, Italy, in 1978, but now lives in the center of Italy. He started drawing when he was a child, continually looking for ideas that would increase his imagination. Andrea has worked as a graphic designer in several fields such as toys, apparel, communications, and more.
Illustration has always been Andrea’s dream in a drawer, and in 2013 moved to freelance illustration fulltime creating covers for Italian and foreign publishers, as well as communication agencies and magazines including Oprah Magazine, The Guardian, and Johns Hopkins.
His illustrations belong to conceptual or surrealist art and his style is mainly minimal and narrative using chromatic contrasts and rarefied atmospheres to compose onirical scenes always trying to give a positive, playful vision.
In his spare time Andrea loves reading books, travelling, riding his old motorcycle, and swimming – themes that often inspire his illustrations.
Q&A
What inspires you to do the work you do?
Generally I’m inspired by my passions and sometimes by my childhood memories. I like imagining singular situations where a simple, commonly-used object is made enormous or transferred to a new dimension so that it becomes a container or a microworld.
What are you most proud of?
I’m proud I can communicate better with my images than with my voice, and arouse different positive emotions from people with my work.
Please share a favorite quote.
"In every activity, passion takes off most of difficulty." — Erasmus of Rotterdam
