I have been interviewed for The Artfuls: this is a website by Tony Lewis made with stylish look and big love to illustration. It is a great place to discover amazing artists and his interviews are so interesting, recommended to any professional illustrator or anyone who wants to be one.

Thanks Tony for your work!

AmazonStudios has arranged a contest to create a poster for one of their forthcoming independent films. I have created a poster for “Devil´s Pass”, a movie about werewolves and cowboys: sounds good! It´s not even in preproduction, but I can´t wait to see it!

Here you have my design. The sentence “werewolves go west” is mine, but I thought it fits perfectly (and it is too fun to be forgotten!).

You can vote for my design at Amazon Studios website: the winner will appear in every promotion, so please vote my design (if you like it!).

Thanks for reading!

Another illustration for SONY Music children´s book. The release has been postponed until 2012 due to make a bigger release with big surprises: details soon!

Thanks for reading!

The idea was to get an intimate look of the Hotels showing that they take personal care of their clients, so Picture Farm decided to use stop motion technique to get that feeling. I worked with them to draw all the animated story board,  a necessary step in order to decide all the poses and times before the actual shooting.

We made two different ads (one of 10 and one of 15 seconds) with some differences between them.

Here you can see my animated story board and the final results for both of them:

10 Seconds animation and ad:

15 seconds animation and ad:

What do you think? I think the results are fantastic! I´ll see them live at the US Open tomorrow (I never miss it!).

Thanks for reading!

For the last weeks I have been working on a big project commissioned by SONY Music. It is a children´s book about classic fairy tales with the voice and music from big artists from SONY. It will published worldwide before the end of the year, but in the meantime I will post some of the illustrations here so you can have an idea of how the book is going to be.

Long projects like this gives you a big reward when they are published and all your work from the last months becomes visible!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more illustrations from this SONY Music children´s book!

A fatty mouse running to get in a hole: another excerpt from the children´s book I´m working on. More to come!

I drew this location map for Picture Farm, a production company in Williamsburg NY (brush and ink: see it on their website here). They are by the Williamsburg bridge and they make really cool work, check them out!

Another excerpt from the book I´m working on right now. More (even the one who she is going to push) soon!!

Long time since my last post, but lots of things have happened: best news is that children´s book Puggle In Pajamas is finished and off to the publisher (will be out in August!). Also I am currently working in a “long time project” with no permission to show anything until it´s published (yes, it´s a book). This little fatty mouse is part of it… I will post small details so you can try to imagine what is about!

Apart from that, I hope I can show you some other works I´ve been working on soon (as soon as they are “public”). Thanks for your patience…

Cheers!

This is a project based on the design of the book cover and sleeve for Robert Browning´s version of this classic Grimm Brothers tale, trying to give it a more up-to-date style.

We were looking for something “stronger” than the classical children´s designs we always see for this kind of books. I wanted to get a shocking image rather than a beautiful one, with the most important element covering all the book: RATS. Living in NY is very inspiring in a lot of different ways, and this is one of them…

Rats, rats, rats: just leaving a little space where our hero the piper appears. And the space is just that: emptiness, white, air where we can breath.

I want to point reader´s attention to the piper, but first I want the reader to go all over the rats: see the problem and then the solution. When creating an image it is very important to know that the observer is going to look at its components exactly in the same order as we want him to do it. Colors, contrast and figures will help us to get this effect.

This is the first composition of the image, with all the dark mass of rats pointing at the character:

We are just taking spectator´s eye to the piper playing with tones and contrast, but we can make it even easier for him. Rats tails are, in my opinion, the most disgusting part of them, so they could be a very good “eye guide” to get this:

Once we have this scheme, we need to find a starting point for spectator´s eye: we know where we want him to end his view, but we have to give him a point to start. We get it adding something irregular that catches observer´s eye first, something that shocks him: one of the tails doesn´t “go with the flow” and crosses the image, so this is the point where the reader will look at first.

Then we use a color connection between the rats and the piper. A limited color palette is going to give the image a stronger impact, focusing the attention on the elements. A “cute” color like pink is going to make a big contrast with the black and filthy rats, and that is very good.

This is the line drawing, made with nib and liners.

Now it´s time to design the rest of the sleeve, based on the idea mentioned before: rats everywhere, we need the Piper to clean them out. All is rats and tails except the cover where we can find some air to breath.

Simple and direct. Then we just add the text from the publisher and the rest of the information and we are ready.

Thanks for reading, and remember if your are next weekend in NY, you can find me at MoCCA Festival from 11am to 6pm, at the Lexington Avenue Armory
68 Lexington Ave (Between 25th &26th Streets). See you there!!