This year I did this linked covers about the relationships between urban and rural life for Revista Papeles. These were two fun assignments!
Category: Blog
This is the place where I talk about illustration, animation, things I like and other things I do. Pretty much is all said, but from time to time I use to update it. Posts by illustration Jon G. Balenciaga.
A bunch of new work
Some work done the last two months has been added to my portfolio. The two illustrations above are about the global warming and how it affects two different countries, the United States will have problems with the level of the oceans with cities like Miami or New Orleans being flooded. China has a more current problem with air pollution which will be increasing to levels really dangerous to its population. Both were done for self-promotion.
Malice and the river of fire. Illustration workflow and process
The illustration above is an old illustration I started 5 years ago. Then I was planning a greater project with the character and the world I began to write. Real life made that project impossible, I had no time to continue it, so most of the sketches ended up in some boxes. Well, enough said about that. This piece was started back in 2008, the first two steps are from then and the rest of them are only 6 months old.
After drawing the piece I usually scan it and do a rough coloring digitally, but in this piece, I watercolored before scanning. This is the digital start point, either with a rough color or watercolored, we have a general idea of the colors and mood of the piece. From now on, what I usually do is mixing the scanned line with the color base. This can be done with several methods, from any artistic filter to the usual finger tool, anyway you can mix the general color with local lines is good. This is what it’s shown on this third step, the basic coloring and illumination of the scene.
From now on, it’s really some easy stuff, nearly of the piece is thought and it’s the time to materialize those ideas. I usually work step by step, locally. In this fourth step some work is done on the red character and the boat.
After some retouches, nearly all the detail on the boat is done, so I continue working on the backgrounds.
Sometimes I feel the scene lacks of some point of interest visually speaking, in this piece almost all the piece has a dominant red, so I chose to draw a secondary light source, in this case, as the picture depicts a fantasy scene, I chose to put a a blue torch, because it would be a really interesting light source and would mix well with the main character and the boat.
In the last two steps are above all, I worked on the face of the character, the face drawn on paper worked well there, but it was not working on this stage of the picture. I left a rough background because I didn’t want to draw attention from the viewer, and the blue torch worked really well with the girl character.
This is it. The finished piece. I hope all this is somehow useful for anyone, if so, don’t doubt to leave feedback on twitter, facebook or google plus. Thanks for reading!
All the eggs in the same nest
It’s been a while since I wrote anything in this blog. If you knew the old one, you should have noticed the changes. It’s been moved from my previous personal domain, jongarcia.info, to this one, jonbalenciaga.com. Why?. Because I had too many sites, and that fragmentation was not good at all. I had my illustration portfolio at jong.es, my personal sites at jongarcia.info, my long-dead illustration and animation blog El fatuo diario gráfico at fatuo.com and made no sense to have them all wandering around, without any real link between them.
I thought a year ago, or something like that, that maybe people who looks at my work at jong.es may be interested on watching my sketchbooks blog. Or maybe, all the audience I still have from my old illustration blog could be redirected to my own work. Those things could not be done with that fragmentation.
So I’ve mixed up everything. I’ve spent hours and hours ahead of the database, making things right. It’s been hard. But now it’s done and will be much more easier from now on.
I intend to make this blog useful for people interested in illustration sharing those little tricks one learns with years of experience and following one of the initial intentions I had with El fatuo diario gráfico back in 2005. Those tutorials will share space with my sketchbooks, and the archives of my previous blogs Alerta Naranja, jongarcia.info and El fatuo diario gráfico.
Be very welcome and enjoy if you can.
Happy new year again!
This year I’ve done something different for the christmas card. It’s been a while since I had the idea of developing with CSS3D one of those old dioramas where the drawings are cut and glued in a box in different positions, thus creating an illusion of depth. So, I got a couple of spare afternoons and started drawing and developing this idea. Probably you can see it but there’s some issues with some browsers and obviously in those that don’t support CSS3D this won’t run.
