All round and in front of her there are couches and chairs that look like recycled from the trash (which makes them wonderfully comfortable and artsy) in a sort of improvised theater. There goes the artists, painters, illustrators, all doing their best to be in a comfortable position while sketching with ink, charcoals, watercolors, pencils, and all sorts of mediums, while drinking red wine from reused jam jars. Wonderful.

True is, it’s a great way to spend a friday night with artsy friends and let your own creative juices flowing, sheet by sheet you get loose and try new things, new approaches and that certainly does me well. It’s every first friday night of the month, btw.

There’s a photo pinned to the inside of my house’s door that my girl put there, of what I imagine is an inner view of Casa Batlló.

I’ve never been there, as it is in Barcelona and I’ve never been to Barcelona. But the weird and wonderful arrange of tiles and shades of blue twisting on those warped balconies made me think not only the amazing places I don’t know, but also the creativity you can put in anything you do. That house is the work of Gaudí, but if you can do something that looks like that out of a house, imagine what you could do with a blank sheet of paper.

So this is the was I begin my 2012. Good luck!

May the warmth of our desires keep us happy and in company of those who fuel them.

This is one of the last illustrations of 2011. Inspired by the colors and themes of CIPPEC’s publications, I felt like trying something in that simple and bold style, which was intended to sum up and empower the text, which is usually long form and articulated.

Something like a month ago Tony from The Artfuls (a great looking site featuring lots of illustrators) contacted me for an interview. It was nice! You can check it out here.

I always wanted to make album covers, specially of great records or artists that I like. I always liked music a lot, and sometimes, a cover made me try an album that I ended up loving. That happened to me more than once. So I thought a great way to shake the dust of that old dream of me was to just do it. I take this chance to promote Emily’s new upcoming live album, which you can fund at Kickstarter. There’s also a great sounding preview clip. So check it out and help!

Last night I had the pleasure of taking part in this year’s Noche de Librerías. They close some of Buenos Aires’ big avenues, and organize several book-related activities, they put some comfy chairs in the middle of the street for people to read, there is some live music, etc. This year Buenos Aires is world’s book capital, so it was even bigger.

The Foro de Ilustradores, together with ADA and Banda Dibujada, organized a 30×2 mts. mural painting, and summoned something like 200 illustrators. Needless to say, it was a fun mess. Everybody passing plastic glasses with one of the 4 available colors, water, lending brushes, asking for chairs, all part of a painterly evening in one of Buenos Aires’ busiest streets. Here’s what I painted:

I hope this kind of things keep happening, as there’re a lot of talented people around here, eager to make this city a beautiful place. Thanks to the gorgeous Gime for all the pictures!

1. As you can see, most things I have to appoint occur during the afternoons and nights. That leaves me a lot of whitespace on mornings. I realize this is not the typical business-oriented calendar, but it’s the one I use, and I would love to get rid of all that nothing on top, and stop looking always at the bottom of the page. It feels uncomfortable.
2. It’s probably Twitter’s and Facebook’s fault, but it seems I got used to read from top to bottom, and it happens to me that I switch open tabs and when I get to the calendar view, my first instinct is that I just missed an upcoming event. This is because the now-bar displayed there separates the new and old, and I got used to the up-newer-upcoming / down-older-past metaphor. It only makes sense to unify those across services. It even works like that in G+ user, Google.

So my proposed setting turns the hours column upside down, leaving the night hours on top, and morning hours on the bottom of the page. It would look something like this:

Much better, right? Of course I’m not saying it should be mandatory, probably I’m not the average Calendar user, but I’ll love to have the option. It could be a labs setting and you could call it beta, and everybody is happy.