Featured in 2 shows this December

As it usually happens, December is a hectic month with a lot of advertising illustration going on, as well as many art shows...hope it keeps this way!.

I participate in the show "Girls: Fact or Fiction" at LightGrey Art Lab (Minnepolis) with other great Illustrators like Kyle Stecker, SamWolf Connelly or Marguerite Sauvage. The character I chose was Cleopatra, by the way.

Opening tonight : Friday 7th Dec
7-10 pm  Light Grey Art Lab
118 E 26th street-Suite 101- Minneapolis, MN

Also, for the people in Madrid, some of my work is being shown with other great artists from Loudart
in the space Utopic_us. Don´t miss it!

International Motion Arts Award!

My thesis project at SVA, Hotel Pandemonium, was an interactive ebook for the iPad. An app that worked like those books from the 80s where you could make some choices that lead to different rooms and endings and then go back and see what would have happened if you followed other paths.

The last semester at SVA was hectic working part-time, learning how to program the damn thing and making all the story and drawings, but it was all worthy and really fun to work with my thesis advisor Marcos Chin, our e-book class teacher Matthew Richmond and the thesis coordinator David Sandlin.

I just found out that it has been awarded in the first edition of International Motion Arts run by American Illustration-American photography and will be showcased at the forthcoming AI-AP Party! So far it´s a student-licensed beta, not available in the app store but if it gets exposure enough I would love to develop it much further!



HotelPandemonium from Rafa Alvarez on Vimeo.

New Cover for Linea Curve Art Magazine

After the craziness of finishing a children´s book in a record time (see post below), I came back to the usual editorial illustration stuff. I was honored to be interviewed by South African-based trend magazine NICE  as well as the outstanding visual arts magazine Linea Curve. The icing on the cake came when they asked me too to create a cover for their new issue (thanks to editors Vanesa Leon and Luis Daza!)

I always wanted to make a cover upside down and see if people could resist the temptation of flipping the magazine. Other than that, royal families can be a nasty surprise for a vampire...

Challenging commissions

So what could be stranger to a "pulp" illustrator than drawing children´s books? And by that I mean true children´s books, the ones that are going to be read by kids and not by their twisted parents (let´s face it, Mr. Burton and Mr. McKean). Well, the publisher didn´t mind about the prior level of illustrated creepiness as long as I kept it cute and colorful this time, so I gave it a try...and I enjoyed it a lot! Now that it´s finished, here is a sneak peak into the story of a certain lady that moved with 7 short roomates...kinda cute, right?

One of these process things

...Not that I have any revolutionary process to show off but now that the school is over and I am officially a graduate in Illustration by the SVA, I think I should leave some proof about the increasing obsession in composition that I have developed after having Marcos Chin as thesis advisor. 

Normally I decide the composition at the sketch stage...however sometimes you just find the idea you like after having inked the whole thing. No problem, the night is young...Below is the process for the contest to illustrate Playboy College Fiction 2012 winner (a story called "The Circuit Builders" by Don Peteroy)...fingers crossed!

And final page after coloring and a pile of adjustment layers

Right choices and good advice

In a day like today, 3 years ago, I was taking a break between powerpoints and pie charts to stare at the drawings that hung of my cubicle walls. Some were my own, some others from superstar illustrators like the canadian and NY-based artist Marcos Chin, whose work in magazines and ads I admired a lot.

I could not have imagined then, that I would get in the School of Visual Arts of New York, move to Brooklyn and become a full-time illustrator myself. But big decisions are not so hard once the right idea clicks. 

Marcos kindly accepted to be the advisor for my thesis project (an iPad "choose your own adventure" interactive book/app coming soon). Not only he is a really cool guy but his advice has made my work evolve a lot by challenging the images in a very constructive, nice but mercyless;) way. This and sharing a studio with some of the most talented young illustrators out there -great friends too- has by itself made the experience at school worthy.

Below a sample of the process..sketches, critique, chaos...and a new one!

...and here the last version (background still WIP...)