Eve

Illustration for an article by Gustavo Martín Garzo about women and femininity. The part I liked the most was a funny paragraph in which the author thanks Eve for eating the apple,  thus freeing us all from eternal boredom in Paradise.

Watercolor and pencil on White BFK Rives + digital

Eve- Final work

Eve- Watercolor

Too much love

Illustration for an article by Gustavo about the nymph Echo.
She felt in love with Narcissus but she wasn't able to talk to him because she had been cursed by Hera. She only could repeat Narcissus's words. As expected all this ended tragically. She died of sadness with her heart broken.

Pencil, watercolor and gouache on grey BFK Rives + digital

Too much love - Final art

Too much love - original work

The Guardian

Illustration for a little story by Gustavo Martín Garzo.
It's about a sleeping little girl.
We need someone to protect our dreams.

Mechanical pencil on White BFK Rives + digital color

Final Work

Graphite

The Forest

This the cover for "Peonza", a great spanish magazine devoted to children's literature and illustration.
I feel honored they've asked me for an interview and the cover of the next number.

Watercolor, gouache and pencil on grey BFK Rives and digital.

I love to use computer to emphasize the color of watercolors. If you want intense shades, you have a big risk of overwork them and ruin the illustration, because colors go easily muddy. So once I have a good range of shades, I like to finish the image in the computer, making colors more intense.

Final Work

Watercolors

Mechanical Pencil

Little Red - 1,3 and 8

These are three illustrations from the first sequence of Little Red.
Acrylic on grey BFK Rives. Click to see them larger.

Little Red - 1

Little Red - 3

Little Red - 8

Little Red - First sequence

First sequence of “Little Red”.

This is clearly influenced by the illustrations from “Birgit” I wanted to investigate further in sequences and transformations. I think I’m not done with both things yet. I feel very inspired by the concept of metamorphosis.

It’s pretty strange when you look back and you noticed how your work progress. Sometimes the evolution is very obvious, sometimes there are breakthroughs, but you don’t notice it in the moment.

When I’m working on a book, I hardly can explain what I’m going to do before I’ve done it, which can to be a real problem when you have to show storyboards and explain your project, but, after all is done, I can see clearly a lot of things I didn’t see before. Everything has sense when you look back.

Anyway, this is the first sequence of the book. The sequence is called “Going Red”.

Acrylics on grey BFK Rives

 

Little Red - Cover

Cover for “Little Red”.
This is the cover for my just published picture book, “Little Red”.
It’s the only illustration no belonging to one of the three sequences  of the book.
The technique is acrylics. It’s been a little hard for me getting comfortable with acrylics since I love oils and watercolors, but they have their own strenghts and I’m glad to have used them for this book.
The final cover as it's in the book is very clean, with just the title and my name. I like it a lot.

Little Red - Cover

 

LR-cover-sketch-2

LR-cover-sketch-1

Little Red

Little Red is alredy out and running.
This is the second picture book of my own, done both as author and illustrator. It barely has text, just a title for each of the three sequences. It’s about Little Red Riding Hood, of course. Some years ago I illustrated the Grimm’s text and I felt in love with the story. It’s funny. It was not, by all means, my favourite tale when I was a child but now I can not stop thinking of stories and images about Little Red.
The book is made of three sequences, “Going Red”, “the Game of Questions”, and “Going out”.  Illustrations are like photograms, stills in a silent film.
It’s been published in Italy by Logos.
ISBN: 978 88 576 0529 6
If you want to acquire a copy, it’s in Amazon, and in the publisher’s site
http://www.amazon.it/Little-red-Beatriz-Martin-Vidal/dp/8857605299/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360512725&sr=8-1

http://www.libri.it/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=6506

Dracula's Brides

Inner illustration for "Dracula" by Bram Stoker.

The three brides are quite fascinating. 

I'm sure each one of them had a little sad and interesting story.

I liked the drawing a lot, so I scanned it before apply the painting. The original work in acrylics is almost identical to the final work, which only has a little adjust in computer, but I've uploaded both versions anyway to be true to the process.

 Final Work

 Acrylics

Graphite

Dissolving

Illustration for an article about a fifteen century poem by Jorge Manrique.
It begins more or less so:

Our lives are rivers
running down to the sea
which is our death.

Graphite on white BFK Rives, color added digitally.

Final work

Drawing