Stylish handwriting for the magic of illustrations

Into the blue, that awakens a mood in me that has a lot to do with daring, cockiness, uncertainty and a sense of adventure. The theatre group Daktylus around Stefan Weßeling and Anne Zühlke has, despite Corona and certainly also with the conflicting emotional states during the standstill of the last few years, animated its choir and acting members to create characters, stories and fantasies that tell something like dream worlds and poetic commentaries on our tricky existence.

To pour such a cocktail of different fantasies into a form and to create a book like Into the Blue, you need a stylish handwriting for the visual side of the whole, the magic of the illustrations. Vanessa Gärtner manages to give the diverse stories their own face with her bright pale blue watercolour tones and the clear graphic outlines of individual figures and scenes. Always wider, always different and yet clearly contoured, her sketches and illustrations lead Into the Blue – into A Poetic Spectacle – a bold experiment worth seeing.