Naughty or Nice?

Merry Christmas everyone!!

I hope you've been nice because Leaves for Chloe is out right on time for Christmas, oh yeah.

And HERE's a list of suppliers.

But if you've been naughty... well you better start making amends right now and hope for the best, Santa's a jolly nice guy after all *hohoho*

Ah my fingers are itching to draw more Chloe...

Leaves for Chloe e-book cover

Meet Chloe!

She is Anna's best friend, she's also the main character of Pat Elliott's novel Leaves for Chloe, and once again I've had the opportunity to bring her to life for the e-book cover.

Portraying Chloe has been such a different experience compared to Anna. By the time I started working on Chloe I had read the first novel, so this chick wasn't a brief but someone I already knew.

It's been a super fun project, drawing outfits, laughing with Pat, turning dogs into lambs and into dogs again... I would have liked to park a trike somewhere in there, but she has high heeled boots in the country so I regret nothing!

Leaves for Chloe will be available for purchase by the end of November, you'll be able to get updates on the dates and selling platforms in Pat Elliott's web page or her Twitter feed.

A tea-leaf reading.

A prediction of turmoil, two men fighting over her and a house move.

Can your future really be told in a cup?

Chloe is feeling down in the dumps. Her best friend got married, her new boyfriend lives at the other end of the country and her ex won't leave her alone. Can she ever have a settled love life?

She has her fortune told, hoping to find some clues to her future.

Her tea cup reading promises a mixed future, with despair, love, new friends and two men fighting for her love. 

Only when Chloe finds her true self will the future be the happy one she longs for.

Join Chloe as misery strikes, hope returns and the battle for happiness begins.

All In The Leaves e-book cover

Meet Anna!

She's the main character of Pat Elliott's novel All In The Leaves, and I've had the opportunity to design the e-book cover for her.

It's been a long way baby, and as exciting as it is to see how all the work is wrapping up and finally out in the open I have to admit I'm gonna miss all the laughs we've had during the process, even through the pert-boob incident (ooops! Shhhh....).

I'm happy to say that it's finally out for sale on Apple's iTunes and Amazon, and it'll soon appear on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, Waterstones.


Check it out!

A tea-leaf reading.

A prediction of a fabulous life to come.

Can your future really be told in a cup?

Anna is feeling down in the dumps. She's nearly thirty, painfully shy 

and has no boyfriend. She's still living at home and has a boring job. 

Can this really be all there is?

A chance bout of tears leads to a tea leaf reading which predicts a 

wonderful future for her.

A future which promises a new career, a new home and a husband. All by 

the following Christmas.

Join Anna as opportunities arise, calamity strikes and the battle for 

happiness begins.

Digital vs. Traditional?

I’ve been ill for over a week guys.  

Have you ever been ill but feeling well enough to get to the painting table just to discover the little nuisances of it all? It can be so frustrating!

That pencil stroke running in the wrong direction thanks to a coughing fit. Or the paint from your brush splattered all over the paper because of a sudden sneeze. How about the brush falling from your hand and rolling over your paper? Believe me, NOT FUN.

At some point I decided to redirect all my creative efforts towards digital, which I seldom do.

The result has been a bunch of new icons, some textures to tweak future images (couldn’t let those splatters go to waste, now could I?) and a couple of little pics for the web.

Like this little ID card, it’s so much fun grabbing scanned images, some stock, a bunch of fonts and unused sketches, throw them all together, stir while it boils and see what comes out of it!

I guess I just need to fangirl for a little bit over the chance of having one art medium that’s not messy when you need it, one that allows as much flexibility as any other traditional medium, one that lets you UNDO the unwanted stray stroke that you make when you cough.

Or maybe the point of this post is simply to acknowledge that digital and traditional are two sides of the same coin, that it doesn’t need to be one OR the other, but both complementing each other. Whatever works, right?

Muffin top illustrated, take one

Lately I haven't been very productive but my friend Angie has put a stop to that asking me to make some illustrations, so I'm having fun doodling, inking and playing with them in photoshop.


She's starting an awesome fashion blog called Fashionista Mileurista (it's in spanish but I'm pretty sure with time she'll make it available in both spanish and english, go take a look!) and wants some illustrations to go with the articles, since one of the images she wants is a muffin top and I was already in the funny-faces mood I came up with this one that may or may not be suitable, either way I did have so much fun with it!

Now I'm thinking that I'll probably play a bit more with this image on paper, with watercolors, to see how it looks.



I've promised to make a little smiling face for her Twitter icon too which hopefully is up to par with the ones she made years ago for mine, I like the final linework but was worried because once resized to the actual tiny icon size it wasn't working, a cropping was needed but I still wasn't happy (click on the image to full view it and you'll see the cropped icon actual size) and after taking a look at it she agreed too.

So this is currently in the middle of a changing process, as much as I like the idea of having her inside her bag that will most probably be edited out, and I need to figure how to keep that scarf in, happily floating around and still not interfering or getting the face reduced.

So revamping the current icon is already in my to-do list and -since I've been playing with styles for the blog illus- I'll probably give a shot to the idea of a more realistic detail of a muffin top seen from behind too (such as the rough sketch on the left of the page), in graphite/charcoal and watercolors.


What do you think? quirky and crazy fun or serious and realistic?

New Twitter banner for my blog sidebar

I've been having this urge lately of making a sidebar banner for my twitter instead of just having the latest tweets there.

BTW ain't it super easy to alt+tab to check your emails and fav pages and social networks and what-not when you're working in photoshop?