Color hunting • Each of her designs takes several months to complete. The process starts with how she sees color. “I have an idea, then I go color hunting through a big pile of my old magazines,” she says. “I love that part.”
Fressilli’s “Giraffes in Love” neck in a rose-colored world of pink, purple and red perfect for a Valentine, or for a special note to an animal lover.
Photo by Charlotte Fressilli
“I basically retooled my brain to change the way I look at images,” she says. When she first started, to make a collage of a lemon, she would look for yellow objects, like an actual photo of a lemon, or a yellow taxicab, but she was surprised when those colors weren’t necessarily right. “I realized our brains fill in so much color based on context, but when you isolate a thing, it changes completely.” Her retooled brain now sees all the nuanced colors in an object — a yellow tinged green, a gray cast to gold, or a blue sky turned just the right shade of violet for a tiny snippet in an artwork.
She separates each subject into all its colorations, then goes through her clippings to find the proper colors.
Next, she concentrates on identifying shapes, starting with the bigger shapes of the background. She builds the central images from her sketches. “My tools? A pair of scissors and a glue stick. Once the design is set, I scan it into the computer, and order prints,” she says.
Fressilli designs cards to help support the Lift Music Fund, a nonprofit organization that awards microgrants to young Black, Latinx and Native American musicians founded by her friend and high school band mate Emily Eng.
Photo by Charlotte Fressilli
For our friends and for the earth. Love, Annabelle • Fressilli’s emphasis on the sustainable in her art extends to supporting nonprofit endeavors of friends. The Young Cancer Survivors St. Louis network Facebook Group moderated by her friend Crystal Payne purchased her cards to thank …….
