Sara Lundberg

Sara Lundberg's picture book Vita Streck och Öjvind is the story of how the girl Vita Streck, the one who controls the traffic by painting white lines in the middle of the road, meets a friend. But their first meeting was dramatic. Öjvind, a boy who follows the wind wherever it goes, drops right down into her paint pot. Vita, who is a very orderly person, cannot cope with this. She wants straight lines on her road, not paint stains and white footsteps all over the place.

Vita Streck och Öjvind is a picture book about friendship against all odds, but also about being the person you are. Öjvind and Vita are each other's opposites. She walks slowly along the road and paints, he follows the wind. She is orderly and controlled, he spontaneous and unpredictable. Their different ways of being are portrayed in a sensitive way in pictures, where Öjvind's fragile, ethereal body with his red, bushy hair is contrasted with the more down-to-earth Vita. The lines that surround them also bear their characteristics: thin and lively against straight and wide. But despite these contrasts and conflicts Öjvind and Vita become friends.

Sara Lundberg mixes paste and water based techniques in Vita Streck och Öjvind. In her pictures she plays with the serial storytelling and lets the typography become an integrated part of the pictures that interact with colour, form and symbolism to emphasise movement and freedom as the overall theme.

Sara Lundberg (born 1971) lives in Stockholm and has illustrated other authors' works since 2002. She broke through with her first own first book Vita Streck in 2009, which was also the first book about Vita.