posted: January 31, 2012

This is the second project I recently created for Monoblock as part of their Live the Love notebook series. Live the Love is a beautiful tribute to those fantastic cities that have been centers of inspiration, creativity, art and romance. Lucky me, I was asked to illustrate Paris!
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Pretty much every neighborhood in Paris says love (okay, maybe not the district of La Défense) but with its steep cobblestone streets, mansard roofs, and quaint cafes, there's nothing like Montmartre, so I chose to use it as the background for a timeless love story. This love story has two characters -four if you are a cat person-; The first one is a chic young waitress who lives on the front cover and works during the day at Café Paris. She doesn't own a cat but there's a special black kitty who visits her whenever she takes a break. She calles him Émile.
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The second one is an aspiring musician who lives on the back cover, above a small brasserie. He moved to Paris from Marseille and his only companion are his guitar and a white cat named Joséphine.
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You could see him sitting by his window for hours, looking towards the front cover as if he knew that someone really special lived around the corner. Sometimes he plays a few chords on his guitar but usually he just sits there with the sun (and a clear coat of varnish) on his face.
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The corner of the brasserie and spine of the book sits merciless in between them, allowing only short glances when the pages are rolled open.
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But it's not all impossible in this love story! Émile and Joséphine get a chance to play together all over the endpapers...
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and along every centimeter of the bookmark!
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Et voilà! Live the Love in Paris is available in many retails stores in Argentina and through the Monoblock website for the rest of the world

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posted: December 16, 2011

Homeless is a beautiful project of urban projections recently created for MTV Brazil by a small but very talented group, including vjsuave as director and my bud Dante Zaballa as character designer and animator.
Here's the short and the Making of. Enjoy!
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"Homeless" by vjsuave from vjsuave on Vimeo.

Making of from vjsuave on Vimeo.

(thank you, Juana, for the heads up!)

posted: November 29, 2011

The follow up of an album I illustrated more than two decades ago (when I used to eat heavy metal and punk rock for breakfast, lunch and dinner) came out this year with a cover I feel very proud of.
The Colombian metal band, Darkness, wanted to put together a compilation of unreleased old tracks and some new material under the title, Guerrofobia (aversion to war), and asked me if I would consider reinterpreting the concept of their first album for this new one they were working on. The teenager in me immediately agreed to the challenge and clung to the first image that came to mind: A monster of war, sadness, hate and despair; A monster of multiple heads, strong body and many tangled, slimy and menacing tentacles.
The heads symbolize some of the characters and forces responsible for the present state of our world: the media, the one percent, the empires, the puppet politicians, terrorism, the military and paramilitary, the abuse of natural resources, the extreme left and the extreme right, big brother, organized religion, pedophilia and child abuse, torture, the business of guns and drugs, racism, hate for the sake of hate... the list is endless and sadly I had to chop some important heads off, in order to keep a clean design and meet my deadline.
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After doing just a rough pencil sketch I switched to the computer. I wanted to tied this monster and the typography with the same bold and industrial look from the head start and I wasn't going to get that by doing pencil drawings of all the characters. I really didn't want to allow myself to go into complex expressions and intricate renderings of shadows and textures.
Looking for reference of war and reading about daily atrocities for about a month, got my blood boiling. The sense of frustration mixed with constant heavy music was starting to mess me up... the art was going in the right direction, though, and that's all that mattered.
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Because I was also playing the role of the designer I got the chance to work closely with the printer, which I wish I could do that more often. Collaboration triggers more ideas, right? For instance, he suggested blocking some areas and throwing a varnish only over certain sections of the illustrations. That simple addition gave a nice dimensionality to the art and made the whole packaging more especial.
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When I first created this iconic face that later duplicated on all the characters, I thought it could work well printed large on the CD itself, combined also with large type that would ran across the inside spread. This face is perhaps my favorite illo of the whole project.
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Here's is the final result being held by a Colombian soldier outside the Presidential Palace. I can't get over the irony of this image sent to me by the lead singer, Rodrigo Vargas, right after the cover was printed.
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And last but not least, the first album I did for Darkness in the late 80s using cut paper and cheap markers (I must have been 18 and in the middle of art school).
The producer "Dr. Rock" suggested that I should illustrate a buch of national and international figures that were the news back then, such as the drug lord on the bottom left corner and the stars of the Cold War towards the center.
For some reason this cover became huge and it's still being featured in exhibitions, articles and publications about the history of rock in Colombia. Hopefully the one I did this year could have a similar destiny.

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posted: November 17, 2011

Yes, this is about design but since it was done by a designer slash cartoonist slash illustrator slash animator slash teacher, I thought it would be a good idea to post it here.
The creator is Juana Medina, a graduate and ex faculty from RISD, with tons of talent, tons of brains and a witty sense of humor. This won't be the last time I post about her -I warn you, people!-

click here to view Juana's response to the Pink Line Project
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