Tell us a bit about yourself and how you found your way to a creative career.
I’m a freelance illustrator from Spain based in Berlin. I draw colorful characters doing things for different publications and brands and have been doing so for a while. I graduated from the UdK in 2013 but didn’t have a strong portfolio nor any significant internet presence or contacts anywhere, so it took me some time to take off. I reached out to small publications for my first editorial assignments and posted my stuff regularly on Tumblr and facebook. Two years later, some small illustration blogs featured my work and that gave me confidence to submit it to bigger platforms and to start posting on Instagram. I got exposure, which led to exciting work and to more exposure and more exciting work. I went with the flow for some years, got to work for some of my dream clients and signed with a nice agency. Life was good.
However, in the summer of 2019, I started going through a series of crises that would accompany me through the pandemic, affecting almost every area of my life at one point or another. During those years, work was chaotic. I was often unavailable, sometimes for long periods of time, and, whenever I could work, I went into survival mode, desperate to secure income to prepare for the next setback. I survived, but lost touch with old connections and also most of my drive to make personal work along the way. Meanwhile, Instagram was becoming super toxic. In the fall of 2021 I got diagnosed with a moderate depression, couldn’t sleep for months and had to stop working again.
Therapy saved my life and last year was very cathartic. I made difficult decisions, solved most of my problems and got much better at accepting and managing the unsolvable. Work-wise, I acknowledged my dissatisfactions, made changes, left places, moved into a new studio. This year, business is oddly slow, the future uncertain and the world makes very little sense, but I’m fine and available.
How did you find your medium and style, and who and what influenced you?
My style has evolved a lot since I graduated. I’d say it’s become cleaner and simpler over the years, partly to adapt to changes in the creative zeitgeist, partly because life was noisy and complicated enough and I strived for simplicity, but mostly for efficiency’s sake: in the beginning, I was just very slow and overworked a lot, so I needed to find ways to work faster and learn to redistribute time, energy and mental space to other activities if I wanted to have a healthy work-life balance in the long run.
I started out with a collage-like approach with drawn details, no outlines and self-made textures on way too many Photoshop layers. Early-mid 2010’s to the max. Very exhausting. I stopped that in 2017, getting rid of the textures and going for more vibrant colors, now flat. This was already much better, but I struggled with contrast all the time and didn’t have enough control over the colors because I was still working on too many layers. I addressed those issues by adding outlines one year later, which was a huge relief, and transitioned to vectors during the pandemic.
As for influences, I think my university years were important for shaping my visual preferences and providing some direction to my early practice. The internet and social media did the rest.
What subjects are you most fascinated with?
I spend a lot of time thinking about politics, gender and identity issues, mental health and trauma stuff, but tend to get booked for tech, work and business-themed projects.
Also, flowers and animals are great, tattoos are cool and music is very important.
How do you create characters, what inspires them, how do you use color?
I like my characters to be simple, easily readable and friendly. I sketch them first on Photoshop or Procreate, then draw them clean on Illustrator, usually keeping the final close to the original sketch. Nothing special here. I keep my own guidelines for faces, shapes, proportions, etc. flexible because I don’t need my figures and objects to look the same all the time.
When it comes to color, I usually reuse palettes that worked well in the past as starting points in future projects. These palettes usually consist of around eight swatches, and I adjust them as needed based on the overall tone of the illustration, the elements being colored, and the diversity of the characters I’m depicting.
If you had to pick a favorite project, which one are you most proud of and why?
From the last couple of years my favorite one might be the New Year’s e-card I made last winter together with Mathieu Maillefer for my French agent Tiphaine. I had been a fan of Mathieu’s animations for a while, so working with him was exciting. Also, it was the first time I saw my vector work animated by a pro. It was very satisfying.
Apart from that, two other projects have made me proud lately. The first one is a comic I made during the pandemic, part of Wlada Kolosowa’s novel 'Der Hausmann’. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever made, around fifty pages in total, and I had to work on it under terrible emotional and material conditions, so finishing it was extremely liberating. Wlada did an excellent job and the final result turned out to be a really beautiful book. It was published last summer by the Austrian publishing house Leykam. I made the cover as well.
My second pick is a Pinocchio little set of illustrations I made with Disney last year for their 100th Anniversary because receiving an enquiry from Disney is just a very pleasing experience. Also, working with their team was delightful and the art ended up being printed on t-shirts and sold at ZARA, which caught me by surprise and didn’t necessarily make me proud but was a very fun twist.
What’s next for you?
Healing, growing, taking things slowly, hopefully lots of nice projects. I also intend to draw more for myself, learn at least one new skill and visit my mum more often.
Rapid Fire Round!
Weekend - lounge in bed / go out and party? An entire weekend in bed sounds too drastic, but I do prefer chill and intimate over hectic and crowded.
Coffee or tea? Coffee.
Cats or dogs? Dogs.
Favorite season? Spring
Cinema or Netflix? Cinema
Pool or beach? Beach
Computer or sketchbook? Computer
Text or voice note? Both.
City or countryside? City.
Getting dressed: colorful or monochromatic? Color-friendly
Thank you Raúl!
