A duck sitting on a yoga mat, face turned to the mirror, complaining that she’s hungry in the middle of a breathing exercise. Another one who, on a summer night, opens the fridge in her underwear in front of a window wide open onto the building’s courtyard. These are two of the scenes populating the Instagram profile Duckly Scribbles, the illustration project by Doriana Cisternino, in which a small yellow duck has become, almost by chance, the comic mirror of an entire generation.
Doriana is from Puglia, holds a degree in Digital Humanities, and has a career path that moved through virtual reality labs, archives and libraries before landing on graphic design. Drawing, though, has always been her most stable ground: as a child she filled notebooks with comics, in high school she kept an illustrated diary with her best friend, and yet for years she never felt legitimate enough to call herself an illustrator, having never attended an art academy or art school.
The duck arrives before the move, almost like an omen. During an evening on the couch with friends, between YouTube, BoJack Horseman and endless conversations about millennial life, Doriana comes across the character from a music playlist: a small animal drawn with just a few lines, yet capable of triggering an instant smile. Her brother has always teased her about having a duck-like voice, and something clicks. A few days later she gets it tattooed on her skin, not yet knowing that this impulsive gesture would become the start of a project.
When she moves to Milan and decides to start publishing her illustrations, the choice of protagonist is immediate. This is how Duckly Scribbles is born, meant to be a duck who is both adult and child, carrying all the contradictions of today’s thirty-somethings: work, expectations, anxieties, nostalgia, sudden hunger at eleven at night. Sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times melancholic, but always able to laugh at herself, and little by little her audience starts recognizing themselves in the comic strips.
Her sources of inspiration remain the usual ones: small everyday moments, conversations with friends, childhood memories, the social anxiety of social media itself. Looking ahead, Doriana imagines an expanding universe, with new characters joining the duck, a collection of comics, prints and merchandise, and maybe one day the chance to turn drawing into her full-time job. For now, she says, she still feels like she’s at the beginning of the journey. And that might be the best part.
