Hi, I’m Christian Breil, illustrator and graphic narrator.
I am also a Member of the Illustratoren Organisation e. V.
“The world is they way you look at it,
take a good look”
My favorite drawing utensil is the pencil, for coloring I prefer oil pastels, ink, and aquarelles. For most book projects I color my pencil drawings on Photoshop.
My drawing career started the day I was born – I cannot remember myself not drawing. At school I wasn’t an A-grader in art class because I wasn’t staying in the margins, but always breaking out of them. My parents took this as a compliment and supported this passion.
After a childhood of piles and boxes of drawings and aquarelles and a few won drawing-competitions I somehow landed at fashion-school. I assume my love for drawing figures and my admiration for dance-moves were a great help to figure out seam-lines and silhouettes for clothing.
In 1998 I spent a year in Florence and Milan, Italy, before I became a copy-writer at a PR-agency in Cologne, Germany. There I was responsible for the art-direction of the B-to-B-magazine RED DOOR for Elizabeth Arden, the New York cosmetic company.
In 2002 I opened my own fashion-boutique with a business-partner to make sure we can sell our very own creations – independent from all dictates of fashion. I wanted to create and sell my own ideas of fashion for mostly men. The style was very rurally inspired and the seams followed strictly the pencil lines of the sketches I made for it. Over all these years I never stopped drawing, always searching for the perfect line.
In 2017 I opened a new shop with my husband, music-producer Royal Fia, after I had already been having a shop, HOLLY, with my own line of clothing for 14 years. But this time we made it a cradle of creative expression in music, clothes and illustrations. We created a network of customers who became friends, people of interesting backgrounds, lives, professions.
That’s how in 2018 I was asked to illustrate a graphic story for the first time, named “ROZSIKA”, being set in Berlin in 1938. The project contained a lot of scenic setting for which I took more than two-hundred pictures of Berlin streets and houses.
I am showing here finished pages of the story, that has unfortunately not been released.
In 2021 my first work as a children’s book illustrator was published: STEFF FINDS A FRIEND (engl. & deutsch), a story about friendship, acceptance and joy – a combination that I found out made also most of my own work possible.
Xoxo Christian