Vulture

This was a color exercise in which I needed to match a photography as much as possible. This image is my painting. Although painting has been such a difficult skill for me to learn; I feel that this exercise really helped me understand it a bit better.

This is a side by side comparison of the photograph and my painting.

Pride

This is a scratchboard illustration with one of the deadly seven sins as theme, Pride

My favorite one!

Well that's all I can say for this painting, it was my favorite. I feel that after 4 months of working with watercolors this is the best I could do. I feel comfortable now working with them. I was very pleased with it and I still am. This was a 40 min pose.

Buffoon

These two paintings were from the same session.

10 min pose.

20 min pose.

Watercolor!!!

These are some of the best paintings I did during these past few months. Some of them are 20 minute poses and some are 40.

This painting reminded me the fashion illustration classes I took last year. Something about the music and the model helped me paint this. I was feeling very inspired during this session. 40 min. pose.

This was another 40 min pose.

This might have been a 30 min pose.

Female pirate

I used a very amazing photo as reference for this watercolor exercise. It has been a great experience to work with watercolor enough to overcome my previous frustrations with this medium. I used ultramarine, indigo and burnt sienna for this on Strathmore 400 series watercolor paper.

Back to Illustrator

This is the most recent vector illustration I have completed recently . It felt good to finish this one since it was a lot of work. I learned a couple of new things while working on it. However, I didn't get to use the most useful features that Illustrator CS5 has to offer when it comes to drawing in perspective. Hopefully for the next one, I will be able to use what I learned doing this illustration and apply it on a more advanced and challenging project.

Retrato de mi Mama

I felt the need of writing the title of this watercolor painting in Spanish since that's the language I use to communicate with my mom. This is one of the first attempts I made at using watercolor. My mom was kind enough to pose for me for about 45 mins. I added the colors a few days later. I used ultramarine and burnt sienna on cold press Strathmore paper.

Captain Kidd

This was an old illustrations that had to wait almost an entire year to be fully finished. The original illustration started as a combination of copic markers and color pencils. It was 18x24 so it took me a really long time to finish it. Since I wasn't too pleased with it I simply had to scan it so I could play around with it in photoshop. This is the final result.

Brozo

This is one of the pieces that involved a great amount of planning and work in order to execute it. I used Illustrator to create the entire layout. Then I did the separation of colors in order to use it in my Printmaking class. I did some screen printing to make this final image. IT was incredibly hard to make each color fall in its place. I remember I did over 30 prints form which I only ended up keeping two. This image is one of those two "good" prints. Then I had to create the frame on which I also printed a design. Finally I had to scan it 4 times since I used a small scanner. A LOT OF WORK.

Into the distance

Another piece that had to wait a long time o be finished! Color pencils and Photoshop.

Earth

This was an old illustration I never got to finish. A few months ago I decided to finish it using Photoshop. The original piece was made with color pencils.

The Big Race

This is the illustration I did for a recent contest on DA based on the Tim Burton Movie "James and the Giant Peach." The contest was about depicting the landscape that where I go to run away from my daily problems. The scene shows a race between three fish in which I win a bet against the Sun and the Moon. The quality of some of the work was outstanding. It was a good eye opener. It made me realize that I need to learn so many other things in order to improve the quality of my work.

The Message

This is a Gothic Illustration I made a few months ago. The concept of this illustration was to use color in a very subtle way to depict a dark scene.

Small Still Life

This was one of my first attempts at painting a still life with acrylic paint. I was satisfied with the results.

Forest

This is a 20 x 30 acrylic painting on canvas I did some time ago. The image was provided to me and I was in charge of interpreting it with acrylic paint.

Clean up of my Grandmother's Old Photo

This was the original photo. There were many
problems with it, including the painted eyelashes.
The scanner also added some extra dust particles and scratches.

After a few hours of working on it, I was able to clean the entire image.
I fixed the eyelashes and burned the background just a bit to add some contrast.

A detail of the face before doing anything to it

A detail of the fixed eyelashes and all the other imperfections.

After everything was done I added some color to the background

and the face.

Portraits of Julie & James

All these portraits were taken with a 35 mm camera with a b/w film. I scanned the negatives and corrected all the imperfections I found on them using Photoshop CS4, including scratches and dust particles. I am thankful for all the help they gave me to create these portraits.

Xavier Emanuel

This is a photo I modified of my nephew Emanuel. Photoshop CS3

New Central Park

One of the first things I remember when I look at this image is, how cold it was when I had to go to Central Park to take all the photos I needed to create this panorama. I used 12 photos to create it. Photoshop CS3.

Greed

This is my interpretation of greed. I used about 20 images to create this illustration. It took me about 20 hours including the time I used to take the pictures at different museums in NYC. Photoshop CS3.

Paint and Perspective

I feel that this illustration was relatively easy to work on. It took me only about a day to finish it from beginning to end. I took about 30 photos of different objects related to painting. For some reason most people miss the light posts that are also brushes!! I used Photoshop for this digital illustration.

Logo Design

Although I do not consider myself to be a graphic designer I feel like I have a good sense for design. This and my love for vector images have led me to explore areas like logo design. This has become a really interesting and fulfilling area for me. Most of these logos were based on sketches I came up with that later on became logos in Illustrator. This top logo was meant to be used for a store that offered organic products.

I created this logo in order to use it as a part of a restaurants visual identity. One of the things I find interesting about logo design is the interaction of text and images. I am usually used to dealing with nothing but images to convey certain information. Text is very interesting and hard to deal with in a successful way.

This logo was for a TV network that focused on pets. I felt that dogs are a very common pet or even the most iconic one we know. For that reason I decided to use the image of a friendly dog as part of the logo. Nonetheless, this channels had also different programs that involved other types of pets.

 Finally this logo was part of a campaign that had as a goal to bring art to less fortunate students. The whole idea behind it was to recycle different materials to buy art supplies for those who couldn't afford them. The name of the campaign was "Recycling Dreams."For this reason the three hands are forming a recycle logo. Each hand holds an art supply such as charcoal and brushes. The hand at the top holds a plastic bottle to emphasize the importance of recycling for the program to function.


I created all of these logos as part of different assignments for different classes. None of them were used in actual jobs, which would have been ideal for me ha ha ha.

A view in Central Park

This is another vector image I created in Illustrator. I feel that it is important as an artist to always base my work on my own photographs when possible. Therefore, I based this vector image on my own photograph. This piece was difficult to work on since I had to force a 2 point perspective view on a photo with a 3 point perspective view. It was relatively easy to work on certain areas. However, I found areas that had to be so far away from the original picture in order to retain the preciseness of the actual vector, that was very hard to make the image look believable. I only used flat shapes for this image. That means no gradients or anything like that. It took me about about 35-40 hours to finish it. All done in Illustrator.

Still Life

This is one of the illustrations I am most proud of. It was very challenging and very frustrating at times. I feel that I knew how to use illustrator before working on this image. However, I felt even more comfortable with the program and with my skills after finishing this illustration. I feel like I learned so much about the program and about my abilities when I was done with it. It took me over 50 hours to finish it. It was a lot of work but I would gladly do it again in order to achieve even better results. This is all vector and I used gradients and the great Gradient Mesh Tool. Illustrator CS4.

Hand Study

This was a study of my left hand focusing on the relationship between muscles, bones and the effect on the outer appearance of it. It was difficult to maintain the same pose for such long periods of time but it was great to do another study of my hands. I used graphite pencils and copic markers on bristol board. The background was very difficult to deal with so I replaced it in photoshop to enhance the overall appearance of the drawing. It took me about 6 hours to finish the drawing itself. Cleaning it up in photoshop were an additional 2 hours.

"Boy Playing the Flute"

This is my graphite version of Judith Leyster's "Boy Playing the Flute." It was very useful to copy a great master like her. Her work is very inspiring and is just as good as any other old master, of course with her own identity and style. The color image is a picture of the original painting. 1630-35.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 62 cm.

FLY-64 Dragon.

I did this Illustration about 3 years ago and I still find it very interesting. I feel that this illustration helped me solidify my picture-making process. I felt like I knew what I was doing for every step I took. The results were very satisfying. The creature itself is a mixture of a dragonfly and a helicopter. Very simple idea but challenging to visualize. I used a good range of graphite pencils going from 3H-9B. It took me about 17 hours to finish it over a period of 2 weeks. This drawing was too large for me to scan it so a photograph had to help me with it. It was incredibly hard to clean up since there were lighting variations.

Still Life and Abstraction

This is an old drawing but i like it very much.
It was one of my first times working with decent drawing paper.
The still life that I had was very interesting.
It took me about 10 hours to finish it but I kept going back to it.
I used a very soft graphite pencils like 6-9B.

This is an abstract drawing based on the original still life.
This was done in micron pens and color pencils.
It was incredibly interesting to create an abstract piece of work since I am usually not interested in abstraction. I found out that it's much more difficult than drawing from life. I think it's because for the original still life,I had everything I needed in front of me. This abstraction was much more difficult to visualize.

Skin, Muscles and Bones.

I used a photograph as reference for this drawing. I really like working with this heavy paper since the texture is so rich that makes the drawings look great. It took me about 6 or 7 hours maybe even more. For the muscles I used a color pencil and kept mixing it with a soft graphite pencil.

Anatomy Drawings VIII

I had a 40 min pose for this sketch. The model was great but
I decided to focus on his left hand since it was closer to me.

Anatomy Drawings VII

40 min pose using charcoal on toned paper.

I like the structure on the knees and feet.
It was a 40 min pose, I used charcoal on toned paper.

Another 40 min pose with a focus on feet only.