Here we catch-up with Robin Schnetler, the Cape Town-based illustrator and mind behind the latest takeover of our Instagram feed. Schnetler is a young graphic designer illustrator (he only matriculated last year) with a vivid and childlike imagination. He superimposes drawings of pared-down and minimal figures onto the real world around him, which you can see in his takeover images and in his own “Monsters Series”.
In this series, his overactive imagination sees him illustrating all kinds of strange "street monsters" on photographs of downtown Cape Town. Schnetler describes his aesthetic very simply: “its weird.”
His Instagram takeover includes a number of entertaining elements amongst the usual creeping fiends: an illustration of a friend’s Chihuahua sits like a mask over the photographed dog and self-portraits fly from forest to outer space.
The charm of his work is surely a result of his youth: Schnetler’s images invoke the wild and unbridled imagination of a child and bring to life playfulness in his surroundings that other people miss. Schnetler is currently studying at Cape Town’s Friends of Design, and gladly so because “high school didn’t really agree with [him],” he says.
“I used to sit in class bored – imagining things.”
Visit our Instagram account to see last week's take over by Robin Schnetler and this week’s takeover with Cape Town-based illustrator Pola Maneli.