I know, I’ve been a litle silent lately. Hallowen, a visit of a friend from Spain, and some illustration and design for very interesting web projects going on lately. Apart from all this, yes, I keep working in the Kooky Pets Book.

Here are a couple of samples of the kind work I’m currently doing for the book. I’m doing some painting retouch and make all the colors pop. I really want this book to be full of color, light and fun. When I started putting ideas together, I realized that some of the colors from the original pictures were a little dim. So this is pretty much what I’m doing. How do you like it?

Some of these mad pets complained at first when they knew they first needed a bath but later, after all they all look very merry and thankful at feeling brighter and colorfull. Does it happen to you when you try to give a bath to your pet?

In the next days I will show you further retouch and even some re-drawing of things and details that are getting better for the book. More to come soon.

I want to give a big thanks to a wonderful person who I’ve recently met at Facebook and Twitter: Wendy Edsall-Kerwin. She is a a jewelry artist and metalsmith who lives in Elizabethtown, PA. She creates beautiful talismans for the home and body inspired by ancient, medieval, and tribal cultures as well as the studio jewelry movement of the last century. Just check out her great jewelry pieces at her website. They look to me like sacred objects for modern shamans from a magical reality!

Wendy has just featured me at her blog as November Artist of the Month and I’m really honored about it. Specially because of her kind words about my work: “reminds me of Edward Gorey or Pan’s Labyrinth. The line detail is exquisite and the fun he has with the pieces is evident and always makes me smile.” Yes, I’m a big fan of Gorey’s Gothic illustrations as well as Guillermo del Toro’s magic reality movie. And it’s such a big pleasure for me to have fun while doing my art work and to know that I can make somebody else smile!

Thank you Wendy. Your talismans and my creatures are sparks of the same reality.

I feel honored to introduce you to the last Kooky Pet: Chiropteresa

With her, the Kooky Pet Workshop ends up and it also marks the last character of the forthcoming Kooky Pets Book, which I’m currently producing. You will be able to see some previews of the book during the following weeks. And if you still feel curious about what is all about please take a look at the last post about the Kooky Pets Book.

Once again, I want to thank you all for following this project and making it possible with your imaginative collaboration. It’s great to have the opportunity of knowing such creative and fun people as you are!

Happy creepy Halloween to all of you!

I’m really excited to announce my new project for the next few months and I believe that many of you will be the same since you are also involved: The Kooky Pets Book.

Now that the sleeve design and illustrations for Kimara Sajn’s “Life Stories” album is over and done, I’m having more time to concentrate on this project that I’ve been profiling for the last few weeks. As many of you know, the Kooky Pets workshop started in June 2009 as a collective creativity experiment where you have been bringing your ideas to build up fantastic characters of pets. All of the Kooky Pets can be seen in this blog. The project is in fact closing down with the Bat Kooky Pet in October the 29th, coinciding with Halloween celebration.

The Kooky Pet Book -this is just a working title so far- it will comprise the whole collection of 12 Kooky Pets that we have produced. They won’t show just as you can see them today. I’m painting backgrounds for each illustration and of course writing texts for each of them as well as designing the most beautiful and fun book I can. You will be able to see previews of this work in this blog during the following weeks.

My intention is to have the book finished sometime between late December and early January. So far, it will be self-published and I’m planning to release a special pre-order signed and reduced price edition. It will be only available for the people who contributed to create the Kooky Pet characters. If you are one of them your name will be also credited in the book as a Kooky Pet Creator.

And now, let’s find a proper home for our lovely insane Kooky Pets!

This is a sample of the set of icon illustrations that I recently produced for the latest web site that my wife and I have built and designed for Naomi Dunford: IttyBiz.com

This is a very popular site in the world of marketing and Internet business with a large following. It was very fun for me to create a set of illustration icons for the site. I bet you never thought that I draw other things rather than strange creatures and wizards!

The illustrations and sleeve design for Kimara Sajn’s “Life Stories” album are done now. It marks the end of a beautiful experience with wonderful people. The album will be released in December and I’m very glad to hear that the booklet print is going be taken care of by using some nice quality paper. I’m really looking forward to seeing it in print.

I want to make a confession here, now that this project is over. About a year ago, I decided that I would like to collaborate again with musicians that I know doing sleeve illustration for no charge, I had done this before in other periods in my life. I make a living from commercial illustration working at the design firm that I run with my wife and partner. And, as you know, I also work in my spare time on more artistic projects as an author and illustrator. I understand that most of these small music projects don’t have a budget to cover the expenses of a professional illustration service and I thought that it would be nice to work on some interesting projects on my spare time, just for artistic and personal satisfaction of the experience.

As you know, for the first 5 months of this year I worked in a set of illustrations for Judy Dyble’s album “Talking With Strangers”. The album was released in August, although I haven’t seen a copy of the album yet. The fact is that, after having worked hard in my spare time for 5 months for no monetary compensation, providing 6 illustrations, the artist and management didn’t fulfill their word and legal agreement in providing these to me. That is also the reason why I couldn’t hold the CD giveaway for the readers of this site, as I mentioned on an early post.

Because my experience with both of them was humanly and professionally so draining and ungracious, I decided that it would be the last time that I would get involved in anything related to the music industry. My mind was completely made up and in fact I decided to refuse a recent offer from the management to replace the original album cover, which a different artist did, for my illustration for forthcoming the US release.

The music business is populated by a court of unscrupulous pirates and insatiable energy vampires. You give an inch and they’ll take a mile. Everyone who is involved in the industry knows what I mean. I started getting involved in the music business in the 80’s, doing sleeve design and logos, stage design and producing music for bands. Most of my friends and acquaintances are musicians. Some of them are well known and others are amateur, but they all have told me hundreds of incredible stories about the sad state of things in the music business.

It’s not the business itself. It’s the people who make it poor. People who are scared of somebody taking a piece of their little pie so they steal everyone else’s first. People who think they’re going to loose their identity if someone else succeeds or gets more credit. So they try to plug the energy flow to try keep it all for themselves. But it never really works that way. It’s simply saddening.

Of course, not everyone in the music business are pirates and energy vamps, my best two friends for instance are both musicians and people who I highly admire. But when Kimara approached me to get involved in his new album, I first thought: “No way.”. We have known each other for three years and I always thought he is a beautiful person and talented musician. I love his music, but I was simply drained from my latest experience. Finally, I decided to give myself a chance to end the year with a beautiful experience that could mitigate the sadness of the first 5 months.

Now, I want to raise my cup to Kimara and B. Sue and toast to them. To their generosity, their personal courtesy, their openness to learning, and their way of putting their love and artistic concerns before ego. Thank you for sharing this experience with me because people like you help the world go round!

Here is the final work for the inlay of Kimara Sajn’s “Life Stories” album: the Dadaist Magician flying on his winged fish ship and spreading the magic words to unveil a mysterious world of future and uncertain to the grandkids.

As I said befor in former posts, the figure of the magician is based on a photograph of Dadaist poet Hugo Ball dressed up as a Magician at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, 1916. I have reproduced the original blue, scarlet and golden colors, same as they were described by the poet: “‘My legs were covered by a sort of bright blue cardboard column that made part of my body look like an obelisk. Over this, I was wearing an enormous gold cardboard collar lined with scarlet paper, attached around my neck so as to allow me to flap it like a pair of wings by raising and lowering my elbows. The costumed was topped off with a magician’s hat, a very tall, blue-and-white striped cylinder.”

To create the spell sentence, “Deep Child Sleep Now Your Book“, I did a sort of fun Dadaist experiment: I made a selection of words from each lyrics in the album, then I put them into the random picker software that I use to pick winners for my giveaways, and did a random selection of 6 words and mixed them all together. It’s pure mumbo-jumbo but it keep the Dadaist spirit alive and the words still contain the spirit of the album.

Very often, people ask me what kind of Photoshop filter effects I use on my digital paintings. The truth is that I don’t use any of them, except for some blur adjustments on the converted vector images to recover the original analog look when they get a little harsh. But apart from this, all you can see is painting and some glow effects.

I keep every segment of my vector drawing in a different layer. For instance, the original vector drawing of the Magician on the ship that I showed in a former post, it’s made of more than 20 layers. Then, in Photoshop, I make layer groups and I usually make about 5 to 8 layers of paint for each layer. I paint using the same technique as in canvas painting, layer by layer with different colors and brushes until I obtain the effect that I need. The figure of the Magician on the ship ended up having more than a 100 layers of paint and you must be thinking it’s crazy… But, believe me, it used to be more crazy in my old days of oil painting when I needed to wait one day for each layer to get dry!

This is a preview of the Magician character that I created for the inlay illustration of Kimara Sajn’s new album. It’s a simple vector version of the drawing to discriminate shapes that will be later digitally painted. The colors that I’m using here are off, just for a mere reference of the different segments of layers to paint later.

In this new version, I’m still using the concept of Dadaist poet Hugo Ball dressed up as a Magician for the public reading of the poem “Gadji Beri Bimba…” at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, 1916. The wizard costume was designed by Marcel Janco and Ball himself. For the colored illustration I’m reproducing its original blue, scarlet and golden colors, same as they were described by the poet.

Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

The idea of using this character has to do with the connection of Kimara’s music to the Dadaist philosophy an aesthetic. The magician represents the wise old people who talk to their grandkids to unveil a mysterious future world, which is part of the main subject the album’s lyrics.

The following picture is a watercolor painting entitled “Exodus” that I did back in 1990. In this work, you can already see my interest for the fish-bird hybrid creatures. I remember I was very much influenced by baroque engravings at the time and here I can also recognize an important dose of Hieronymus Bosch. He was one of the first classic painters who ever influenced me.

“Exodus”, Koldo Barroso, 1990

Since I was 4, my grandmother used to take me every once in a while to visit the Prado Museum in Madrid since we lived really close to it. I remember being specially fascinated at the view of “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. I can’t tell how many hours I must have spent in amazement, standing jaw dropped in front of this breathtaking painting that appears to be a door to a different reality. Did you know that the king of Spain, Phillip II, who owned the painting at the time, asked to have the painting hanging on the wall in front of his dying bed at El Escorial palace, in order to stare at it his last hours of life? Imagine the things that he must have seen at his last exhalation…

Detail of “The Garden of Earthly Delights”

Have you ever seen a wood made of light? I did so in my dreams and that’s the reason why this is a recurrent image on my works. 13 years ago, I started having a series of dreams where I discovered a garden of light. Yes, it was a regular garden of flowers and trees except for all of them were made of the purest and brightest light I had ever seen and imagined before. I saw all of the flowers and trees glowing with a splendorous shinning that would keep me completely mesmerized in ecstasy, just like if time had stop and I was amidst a limbic dimension. This is one of the most beautiful and transforming experiences I have lived in my life.

After visiting the gardens of light, I got obsessed with portraying what I saw. For a while, I felt very frustrated because I knew there was no way to show the intensity, peacefulness and purity of that light. It belonged to a different reality but not this. This light changed my way to see nature, art and music. It drastically influenced my forthcoming works to the point that I worked on a series of music recordings with no rhythm, no lyrics, no chorus, no melodies -sort of avant-garde music- just creating forms of sounds and textures, conceiving music as a mere happening of living energies. This happened many years ago…

Today, I still like to portray a little glance of the gardens and woods of light, a slight look and feel of what I experienced in my dreams. So this is what I’m doing for the inlay illustration of Kimara Sajn’s CD album. It’s only part of it, the rest is yet to come. It’s all about a mysterious wood of light: a wood that exists in a different dimension that the one we’re usually aware of. I know that we can enter this other dimension if we change the vibration level of our conscience. Children can do this all the time, so why can’t we?

I’m sure I am not the only one who had lived these type of experiences so if you have too please feel free to share yours here.

This week I’m working on the inlay illustration for Kimara Sajn’s album “Life Stories”. Here is a little preview of the concept, a pencil sketch. As other former sketches that I’ve done for this album, I’ve been inspired by the infamous photograph of Hugo Ball dressed up as a magician. This character was put away from the album cover but we still wanted to use it, so this is the proposal.

You might be asking yourselves about the “random words” thing. well, this is a crazy idea that I had for the concept, and I think it worths a try to see how it looks. It’s all about a sort of Dadaist experiment: we want to pick several words from the album’s lyrics and then mix them all together in a random way in order to make a nonsense sentence. a sentence that means nothing or everything, but it will contain powerful words related with the album.

Still we don’t know if this is going to work at all but at least it will be fun to see what comes out, and I tell you this: fun and mutual understanding it’s more interesting that other “important” words that some people give too much credit to, such as “privilege“, “prestige“and “reputation“. I mean, I love to be involved on this project!