I’ve been having a small canvas lying around for more than a month, and the idea kind of already on my mind about this image.

A young lady with her hair on fire, who covers her eyes and walks towards a lake. She’s literally burning with desire but choses not to see what’s clearly in front of her. That will eventually end up with her fire killed by the water, but in the meantime, its light brightens up the whoel forest and fills it with red sparkles of taste.

This is my first ever acrylic painting ever. It started like playing on some bent cardboard while talking with this artistic fellow,  and ended up with a lazy sun at rest, sitting at the edge of a lake, against the mountains, and smoking a pipe. Why no?

It’s pretty small, like 17×11 cm. Real world brushes are hard to use and fun!

Following my recent chain of getting the todo list smaller, and thanks to me having fever for three days in a row, I finally got to make a short video with the footage from the trip to Patagonia. I had a lot of small little clips taken with my Canon G7 (that one from the Australia trip) so I edited them and this time I tried Photoshop CS4 to make some postprocessing. The thing now accepts video as imput and lets you apply layers and stuff like it is a static image, awesome!

I edited it based on José Gonzalez song not so much as to make it on the lines of the other video, but because it was the music I was really listening to sometimes while strolling through those beatiful forests. So it’s not magic that it matches.

There’s also a Flickr set with more pics of the journey.

When the path on the soil has the shape of your hair

when that path made of steps somebody and me took before,

takes me to a room with no door, to a gate with no walls,

to silence in a morning of thin clouds, to the smell of perhaps,

grows in me like a flame built over damp wood

delicate and strong

a calling of When, and sometimes, of Who.

I bought my second canvas, this time it’s very small at 13×18 cm. I still only use oil pastels, some fingers, and the back of a brush to sharpen the details. Next time I should try proper oils for the first time.

(The orbits and names I put them on Photoshop so you can easily get the idea.)

So I’m very happy with my nerdy light arrangement that’s since a few days ago lighting up my living room. I gave it the extra touch by chaging the regular switch for a dimmer, so intensity can be manipulated.

Inspired by Hsinping Pan’s style and a short poem by Lorena Scigliano, where a little bear plays hide-and-seek with both his parents. So I decided to play with a way more childish-bookish approach to illustration than usual. Even though I must admit I wasn’t comfortable at first, I’m pretty happy with the results. It seems this year may bring interesting new things. Here’s the full text.

El juego del oso

Sale de la caverna
la familia del oso.
Es el primer verano
del pequeño mimoso.

Juega entre los árboles
Ríe y corre, se esconde
El papá oso lo llama
Mira y pregunta ¿dónde?

La mamá oso lo busca
Le dice al papá: ¿lo ves?
Entonces el osito
salta y grita otra vez.

Comienza el nuevo juego
Piensa: ¡qué divertido!
Busca el hueco del tronco
de nuevo está escondido.

Cada tarde pasea
y su juego repite.
Se divierte buscando
un nuevo escondite.

Some days ago I was standing in front of a shop window I’ve seen many times before, looking at a small canvas I’ve seen many times before. Only this time I entered the store and I bought it. I don’t even have oils or acrylics, I have oil pastels.
This is my first attempt at a canvas. No CTRL+Z here, no layers, no previous idea. I kinda like it, feels like a real thing, and this time it is.

It has certainly been a while.

This one to me it’s about ourselves walking with our big, familiar, and comfy old ideas behind us. Those ideas that may not make us very happy, but that certainly make us what we are. And reaching out for those new colorful ideas, that look and are indeed smaller, but with enough care will grow into beautiful ones. Into different ones. And therefore, into different ourselves.

Click on the image to see it bigger at dA.

_{So I had the idea of keeping the sky-blue and bird aspects of Twitter and add a geeky touch with the laptop and glasses. Am I original or what?}

What wasn’t easy at first but now I’m pretty setisfied with is that I used Illustrator to get the thing done. As some of you may know, I’m not a vector guy. I’m a photoshop guy. A sketchy guy. I think those looks suit this kind of apps better, so I give it a try.
Of couse, after that I got all excited about making things and changing bit and reusing parts, so I made a few more posses for our feathered fellow, then I made the obvious 404 error page that cannot be missing:

_{I like the 50’s-ish flat tubes and the yellow helmet I gave him.}

After all this, I was ready to make myself a stripped down background for my own Twitter account featuring our little fellow and clouds, thought to be tiled and lightweight. You can see it in use here.

I made a small video with the two clips I asked Yami to take while we were coming back from our weekend at Mar de las Pampas. The clips were intended for passingby.net (and you can see them there by looking right!) but just a couple of hours earlier I had the idea it might be nice to put those together with some music and quick sketching about the trip itself. So I looked and found CamStudio and used it while I played with Photoshop and the Wacom. The music is CC licensed and I got it from Magnatune, both songs are by Arthur Yoria from his album Handshake Smiles.

Ink and watercolors. Levels and cleaning in PS.

Happy holidays and gift making for us all!

She feels the breeze and stops.
The first chill dries her moist soily hands, slowly.
Warmth rises from the ground through her legs, balancing it all.
She has the whispering voice of any wet dream, but remains silent.
Until I sleep.

Single pencil drawing, A4 size. Scanned and painted in Photoshop CS3 with Wacom Graphire4, a Raphael’s painting as color reference, standard round brush only. (+/- size, opacity, and flow)
Why Maria? She looks latin, nice, and it’s generic enough. Also has a religious connotation because of the pose and the palette which reminds of renacentist artwork. Why Calas? Because of Maria Callas, and calas, of course. Am I smart or what?

This print is available for purchase at the store.

Let me blow off the dust on your skin,
so you can breath again.
Let me blow away the doubts on your way,
so you can see my footprints beside.
Let me blow out the cold in your feet,
so you can warm mine.
Let me blow up myself,
so you can join me again, pretty lady.

First I got a very nice work to do, for Houghton Mifflin Co. from the US. They were 80+ illustrations for a textbook¹, similar to last year, but this time mostly on greyscale. It’s not only rewarding but also a very nice work to do, and the people is excellent. The goddess of freelancers touch me there, so I had work for three months, great.

But then I got another call, roughly one month after that, from a local animation production house here called Encuadre, to work as a 2d animator² using Toon Boom Harmony. This was no freelance from home job. This was a full time, wake up at 7am, 20 mins walk + 1 hour bus, work lunch, back after sunset at 6:30 monday to friday kind of job. I took it.

Well, I will spare you the details of my endeavors, but let’s say I slept little, I use the mouse a lot, and I ate on very different places, oh and met quite some great fellows.

The last month I had to quit this ars-paid job to keep my deadlines with the usd-paid job, but it was a nice experience. Now I have my last deadline the first day of spring, isn’t it great? Looks on purpose. Expect many submissions after that, looking forward to try some new stuff on my own stuff, so to speak.

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On another topic, I realized another of my long thought ideas. Since June I’ve been making (together with a good friend of mine) a podcast in spanish called Etcétera. It’s a fun chat about lots of topics, everyday musings, movie commentaries, critiques of the people, odd news, random thoughts, and bizarre bits of general knowledge scattered between serious sentences and funny quotes. I’m really sorry I don’t speak english that well so as to make it understandable for all of you, but if you are one of the spanish speaking deviants who also happen to read this, please check it out, subscribe, whatever³, and tell me what you think of it. It’s a very important project for me and I’ll be delighted to read your feedback.

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Long journal indeed, thanks for caring and reading.

<sub>1. It’s a college spanish learning textbook called Anímate. It’s related to Claro que Sí and Imágenes, the ones I worked on before.
2. They were producing the first season for Nada Que Ver, a kind of latin South Park for the Sony LA cable network.
3. Again, you can find the podcast at etceterapodcast.com
4. The photos at Flickr have several notes explaining contents.</sub>

I hope it says something about the great worldwide community I think TFTTF listeners form. The mug comes in two different sizes and it’s available for sale at my deviantART shop.

And you have the chance to win one of those!

I wanted to thank all the people that bought TFTTF mugs in the past, and specially those who had fun with them, and took cool pictures. In fact, earnings coming from that help me to finally buy a proper digital camera, which I used to take this very photo:

^{* The photo shows an image overlay over the actual smaller mug model.}

As a result, I’ll be giving away one 325 ml mug, that looks like that above. Here’s how to participate:

1. Take a picture of your TFTTF mug, whether it’s the classic one, the 100th episode limited edition or the new one doesn’t matter.
2. Upload it to Flickr.
3. Label your photo with the roamingtfttfmug tag.

That’s it. Easy as 1, 2, 3. You have until June 30, midnight. With the last bell, the draw closes. I’ll randomly choose one from all the correctly tagged photos and that would declare the winner. Several people already took awesome photos from all around the world!

ONE LAST IMPORTANT NOTE: As I live in Argentina (yes down there) shipping is pretty expensive to anywhere, so the mug will be shipped from dA itself, as a result, to participate on the contest you must live on a country dA delivers to. Please check the list if in doubt.

The feeling that chance, luck, fortune, or better said, opportunity is behind us may strike us more than once. Hopefully not often, but that deep low humming behind our backs can be hear sometimes. Some people try desperately to be ready for the moment opportunity knocks on your door. They stand eager and crouching, with a tighten contained running behaviour, ready to be unleashed and to prove themselves worthy of that opportunity. That is a hard wait. Some people take an even harder path, they turn their backs to external fortune, they start walking on a dark endless room, filled with random windows filled with striking bright light, each one a different color, and they start to stumble, each step a bit deeper, each foot a foot further away from the help of others, but also statiscally closer to find one of those windows. I think there are a good number of those people here in the internet. Those are the persons who create.

Good luck!

I start this one on Painter because it was so long since I tried something there that I thought it was going to be fun, and it was, but kudos to the people at Corel, the thing is too realistic and I’m a mess. I ended it on Photoshop, my usual weapon of choice, but I like the texture it kept from the brush tool in Painter, it must look really nice printed on canvas.

For those couples out there that sometimes feel everybody else is not their cup of tea.
For those who managed to get their own cup of tea to be happy in.
For those who chosed having less room and more hugs.

So thank you Gisella for your interest and the things you say there!

You can read the interview online here.

I won’t entertain you with the technical issues behind this little piece of video, but let’s just say it’s finally done. All clips taken with my new Canon G7, at different resolutions. I’m a bit ashamed to have used copyrighted music but it was too perfect a fit to let it go, so excuse me José.
What a special wonderful time I had there, and it’s mostly thanks to both Amy and Gary for being such great friends, hosts, mates, and tourist guides.

What to look for: translucent water, wrong side driving, wombats and wallabies and peacocks and goannas, funny wii moves, camping, sleepy faces, lots of coins, coins used in blackjack, me in diving suit, 3 laptops, sharks and turtles and fish, a thermos, a funny japanese guide in colorful shirt and glasses, incredible view of australia day from the opera house hall, thai food, crazy octopus, lifeguard championship, welcome mat, happy bodyboard, gorgeous fridge with cheddar, and many beautiful smiles.

The images were made on paper at a 2:1 scale, scanned and painted in Photoshop. They appeared along each day’s short episode from December 1st to 24th, and here they are: