THE WRITER

I had that idea for a very sad, melancholic illustration about a writer living in a house that was actually a cemetary. In my mind it was a dark, sinister, somehow Mignola-ish illustration that I really wanted to do... but I postponed it for a while, and when I took it up again some weeks later I found that I had changed my mine. Now I wanted to try how the same idea would look like if rendered with a bright and colorful style. I also decided to use flat colors to make it even naïver than the original idea. The result is, of course, something totally different from what it should have been, but I enjoyed a lot doing it.

The model for the writer was actress Mónica López, after some pictures of her I took during the filming of a music video she starred.

355

For some reason female characters seem to me more interesting than male ones. If there is a book with plenty of female characters that is Y The Last Man, and my favorite one there has always been Agent 355. When I thought of doing a 355 illustration I wanted to capture the dual essence of the character: the agressive side and the delicate one. Just as J. G. Jones' covers for the book, I also wanted to create a "Y" shaped composition here.

I think it's time to re-read Y The Last Man.

[Y The Last Man and Agent 355 created by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra]

THE WILD BUNCH

This illustration began as a drawing for a tattoo a friend of mine wanted me to design for him. The tattoo was meant to show one of Sam Peckinpah's most famous frames from his film The Wild Bunch. But then the graphic designer inside me (ah, that little annoying bastard!) started messing with it, and that's the final result of it. I tried coloring this illustration, but I finally decided to keep it black-and-white to give it a more serious look.
[The Wild Bunch is a Warner Brothers film directed by Sam Peckinpah]

SCOTT PILGRIM

For this illustration I used photoreference, as I wanted Scott to look like Michael Cera (who's portraying the character in the upcoming Edgar Wright movie). Apart from that, the illustration is all digital. Even though it's a black-and-white book, I always imagine the Scott Pilgrim universe as a colorful place, and that's what I wanted to show here. The use of crazy elements in the image (like pink letters or shinning orange stars) contribute to create that surrealistically pop atmosphere too.

I've been a fan of Scott Pilgrim since I bought Volume 2 at Jim Hanley's Universe in 2004, during my first trip to New York City. I had read some reviews and had seen some preview pages from Volume 1, and although I didn't know who Brian Lee O'Malley was and didn't know anyone who was reading the book, I just got the feeling that I was going to like it.

[Scott Pilgrim created by Brian Lee O'Malley]

100 BULLETS - MONEY FOR NOTHING

This 100 Bullets illustration (kind of a fake cover, too) is a strange mix between photos and digital drawing. I liked the idea of composing the image the way you can either understand the girl is a potential victim of the gunman or his superior. When coloring it I decided to avoid using greens on the bills and turn them red, to have a more limited palette and also to symbolize the relation between money and crime (red is the color of blood).

My wife and my father were the models here.

[100 Bullets created by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso. The Vertigo logo is a property of DC Comics]

SELF-PORTRAIT

I went back to a digital technique I started using some time ago and made this self-portrait. Some features have been slightly exagerated to get a humorous look, but yeah, this guy here is pretty much me.

CLOSE UP

Sometimes, when I want to switch off from work for a while, I draw extreme close-ups. It's something that comes very easy to me and I love drawing them. I already posted another one some months ago, but this one here is not from any known character, but just some anonymus guy.
I also used this casual drawing to try some coloring techniques. It didn't take me much time to finish this illustration but, while simple, I liked the final result and thus I posted it here. Some details are more noticeable in full size, though, so I encourage you to clik on the image and see it in a bigger size.

DMZEE

It's not a secret that I'm a big DMZ fan. Zee Hernandez has been my favorite character since the first volume, and even more after I read DMZ #11. In fact, the reading of that issue made me think that it would be nice to have a limited series about Zee's first days alone in New York, making enemies and allies and finding out how to survive in the middle of a war. That's how I came up with the idea for that illustration.
[DMZ and Zee created by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli. The Vertigo logo is a property of DC Comics]

CAT THIEF

I made this drawing many years ago, around 1996 or 1997. It was just pencil and ink, with no color or background. I found it last month and scanned it. Looking at it it's easy to realize how much I was influenced by Alan Davis (who is one of my favorite artists in the comics industry).
I've always enjoyed drawing catpeople, and that's why last year I came up with an idea to write all those characters into a comic-book or a graphic novel. Yeah, maybe one day I'll send it to an editor. You never know.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

I tried a different process of drawing and coloring for this illustration. I'm not a hundred per cent happy with the final result, but it's got some things that I like.
Captain America is one of my favorite Marvel characters, maybe because The Avengers was my first superhero comic-book ever and he was the leader of that awesome group back then. I was thinking about drawing some fake Captain America cover, and then it ocurred to me that Cap could be holding Red Skull's skull as in the famous Hamlet scene.
[Captain America, Red Skull and the Marvel logo are a property of Marvel Comics]