It’s been a long time since my last post. So this is my first post from my new home in Bellingham, WA. Naomi and I have been here for 11 days now and things are starting to settle down a little and we already started back to work in our new studio. We love Bellingham! We are really happy in this quiet place and we realize it was worthwhile the enormous work and sacrifices we’ve got to do to get here. So this is the beginning a new stage for our lives and our careers. And I can already tell how inspirational the mountains, the woods and the sea in this area are going to be for my forthcoming work.

So I will be updating this web site regularly with new illustration works and blog posts like before. I need to do some new works for my portfolio and start keeping in touch with editors and agencies in the area and anywhere in the US and start moving things. It’s going to be a bit busy but very very exciting for me!

The Roothorn sculpture by Koldo Barroso, 2006.

The Roothorn is a character for my book in works “Portraits from the Dreamlands” that I created before I started writing the project, two years ago. I actually designed it for being sculpted and a picture of it was used for a Christmas greeting in 2006. At the moment, it hadn’t been painted yet. In the first place, I was going to leave it unpainted in the original white color in order to work later on the computer with different colors. It didn’t quite work so I decided to paint it afterwards.

For the character of the Roothorn I was inspired by a particular walk by the mountains in Miraflores de la Sierra, Spain, where I used to walk. It is a beautiful area where Naomi and I spotted deer a few times and there is a beautiful cascade surrounded by huge pine trees. On top of the cascade, in the winter, there are always clean waters filtering from the top of the mountain. I love to drink water straight from the leaking rocks.

All these things gave me the inspiration for this character, the Roothorn, which is a spirit of wisdom from the nature: half tree, half deer and half human. You may encounter him in a dream if you ever get lost in the woods and you walk for so long that you start getting weak and dizzy. The Roothorn will come to you and let you drink fresh and clean water pouring down from his hands. But this is a long story that I will detail in the book “Portraits of the Dreamlands”.

For the making of this sculpture I built an structure made of wire and wood and I sculptured on it with polymer clay and plaster. During the late 80’s, I used to make a living by selling sculptures with a similar technique. For the body, I used different material from the nature in the same area where I got inspired, such as pine tree scales. I also used some artificial materials for the moss.

I plan to keep doing more sculptures in the future but I will want to try different kinds of materials that can be easily transported so I can get them exhibited. It’s a project that it be developed in the next few years. Part of it involves mixing sculpture, photography and illustration.

When Naomi and I started planning our moving to the US, I realized it was going very difficult to transport this sculpture, especially because of the big horns. So I decided to give it away in Spain. Most of the time when we get friends visiting our place they don’t notice my artwork, weather is a sculpture or paintings and drawings. They just don’t pay attention to it and this is an issue that I have tried to learn how to deal with throughout the years, to lower my ego and just let things go. So this time, I decided I was going to give away this sculpture to the first person who would notice it. It’s been in our living room for months and a few people saw it but nobody say a thing about it -even being about 35″ tall- unless I would mention it first. Until my friend Mayte Cruz got into the room one day and spotted it.

Yesterday, we said goodbye to our dear friends Mayte and Julio and their dog Runa who it’s been our “summer guest” for the last few years. They’re moving to Berlin for a month and we won’t be in Spain when they’re back because we are moving to the US by early September. So we had a “goodbye dinner” and of course they took the Roothorn sculpture home. And I know that it will keep stronger an invisible link between us despite of the distance, because we are going to miss them so much!

I read today in Tor.com about the passing of Pauline Bayes, the celebrated illustrator who worked with two of my favorite writers: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

I think she was one of the most breaking ground illustrators ever. She had a unique style balancing the compositions and working with straight lines and geometry. I especially admire the way she managed to bring the old Medieval and Romanic flat imagery into modern illustration. She was also unique working with black and flat colors.

Pauline’s work will be here for us to enjoy and admire. Thank you Pauline!

We have finally rented an apartment in Bellingham, Washington. It’s a two floor duplex located in Roosevelt neighborhood and we think is a really nice place for us to start out in Bellingham!

For a while, Naomi and I have been deciding whether to go to a more natural surrounding in Sudden Valley or stay closer to the city life. We finally decided that it was best for us to start living in town so we can get to know it better and meet new people, make friends and make business connections.

We’ve been living in pretty small Spanish village for the last five years, and we feel like needing a little bit of city excitement now. The place where we still live now in Spain is close by the mountains, but is more of a summer residence place for yuppies and we never quite fit in here, although it’s just a 30 minutes drive from Madrid.

We feel like we will have everything we need in our new location. We have nice parks like Whatcom Falls and Cornwall Park pretty close for our daily walks and also we’re not too far from downtown so it will be very exciting to investigate the city life.

Our house is full of boxes now and it’s being a little stressful between the work and the moving. I’m not being able to work in my book as much as I would like. So this blog is getting a little quiet for awhile. I will be posting a few things here and there though. The countdown has just started so we will be in Bellingham in a month!