To finish the series of posts about the illustrations and design for this web site, today I’m going to talk about the characters in the header. As I said before, when I decided to do a web site for my illustration I wanted it to be as personal as possible. So there are lots of personal references to my life in this design and especially in the characters that show up in the header. I won’t unveil them in detail because I don’t want to bother you with the story of my life but for those who asked I will give a few hints.

The main figure of the three-woman is probably the first thing I ever had in mind when I did the first sketches for the design. I wanted to create the feeling of a wood, a magic garden and a long figure that would connect the bottom with the top part of the site. I imagined this figure as a representation of nature that connects the underground world with the sky, so I thought of this character who is half woman and half tree. This is not the first time I have worked with this type of figure, I have done similar characters in other illustrations and sculptures before.

From the aesthetic point of view, I found very interesting to use the same style of the black trees in the header illustration with the figure. She brings the primal energies from the underground and world and blows a wind full of lights where you can see different scenes from my past. Each ball of light represents a different stage of my life. Originally, I had six stages in mind, meaning six cycles of seven years each. For visual reasons I decided to simplify it because I didn’t want to get it too crowded, so you can see only four scenes which represent some important scenes from my life in relation with my illustration. Let’s see what we have in each.

On the first scene, you can see me when I was 10 dressing up like a clown, just like in this picture. As a kid, I was obsessed with circus and clowns and for a few years I just asked for the same circus toy for Christmas, year after year. The children figures may remind you of Mary Blair and it’s not a coincidence. Usually, my children figures don’t look like this, but this time I wanted to pay tribute to Mary Blair and her influence on the books that I read in my childhood. Before this design, I had also paid a similar tribute to her works with a header design for the header of a former blog that I used to have called “Generación Chiripitiflautica”.

The second scene represents the present time, featuring my wife Naomi and I, holding the light together as if we were still two kids. what you see here is a former version that I did and was not used.

This scene means a lot to me because is only because of Naomi’s initiative and constant support that I decided to work again in books and children illustration after some years of loss of self-confidence and retirement from painting. She helped me understand that I could make other people happy with my work and recover illusion for the work. So, for me, my illustration work is a project that we both hold together hand by hand.

In the next scene there is a green goblin holding the light. It represents my teenage years and the influence that a generation of British illustrators, such as Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Patrick Woodroffe and Roger Dean had in my life. I think I have already talked about this before in my Bio page and in an article about Brian Froud. Looking at their books I discovered that there was a new form of art further than comic books called “illustration”. It was not the same kind of illustration that I knew from children books from the 60’s, it was something really attractive and imaginative, fantastic, magical. It also it had a lot to do with the culture of the rock music I was into… and it was for adults! Then my whole scope of being a professional artist changed. If it was not for their fantastic works I don’t know what would have become of me…

In the last scene, there is a mysterious freak character sleeping. It was inspired by an ad from an old newspaper that I had recently found in Flickr. I love to look at old publicity and many of my ideas come from there. This figure also reminded me of the famous haired men who suffered from a disease called hypertrichosis, such as Stephan Bibrowsky -who was famously portrayed by Diane Arbus- and Petrus Gonzales -nicknamed “Wolf Boy”-. So this character represents myself during the 90’s. Not only because my hair was really long at the time, but because I feel like during those years the illustrator side of me went through a long state of hibernation. Although I think I have been a pretty active person who has always been involved in different creative projects, I have the feeling that for those years a part of myself was merged in a profound sleep.

If you have any questions about the rest of the header I’ll be glad to answer but hope not to get all the mysteries unveiled…

Carrying on with the series of blog posts about the design of this web site, today I will talk a little about the background of the header image that contains the city scenery. For me, one of the most captivating subjects ever are old cities, especially European cities such as London, Madrid, Paris, Prague… There is a sense of mystery and charm built in to these kind of cities at night that I’ve always found fascinating. It makes me feel like reproducing a certain atmosphere in my work; half real and half impossible. This has a lot to do with the recurring dreams that I’ve always had where I visit these kind of old cities that don’t exist in reality but I would swear I know so well. Yes, cities and houses are fascinating because, just like nature, they keep secrets inside and they are impregnated by the energies from the most incredible events. Every house tells a story, every window holds a secret.

For the design of this web site, I wanted to locate the illustration in one of these non-existent cities from my dreams. It could be any city, it doesn’t really matter to me, probably somewhere in some other reality. It is funny because my friend Catherine Morley located my illustration in the Basque-French Country on a blog post at her site Designers Who Blog. She was probably influenced by the fact that that’s where my origins are and also because although she lives in Thailand now, she visited the Basque-French Country many years ago and it reminded her of it. She was right because there is a resemblance with some of the typical Basque architecture, like you can see in this picture of a typical house in my family’s hometown, Orduña.

But the truth is that, to illustrate the houses I got most inspired by a series of postcards from the 19th century that I had recently found at Livejournal’s Vintage Photo. They are beautiful colored postcards with pictures of a charming village in Lower Saxony, Germany, called Hildesheim. If you google it you will find the place still remains just the same and I really hope I can visit this lovely place sometime.

Some other illustrations that you can see where I have portrayed this idea of the city are “Old Europe” featuring Paris and “Broadway Nights”, featuring New York.

In the next blog post I will talk about the rest of the header illustration: the characters.

“The Mesmerizer” by Koldo Barroso

I have mentioned before that “The Mesmerizer” was inspired by Gothic literature. Probably mostly from E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “Der Magnetiseur”, but it is not an illustration of the story. I guess that the images from the book have been stored in the back of my mind and somehow they just popped out now, because I read the book more than 15 years ago. For me, the most important thing was to capture the atmosphere and the restless feeling of the character who can look inside of people’s souls and control their wills.

In the following image, you can see the version of the stairs that I first did using a pretty adorned pattern for the wrought metal steps. It was beautiful but I decided it was too busy and it would steal protagonism from the main figure. So, I decided to start a new stair using a more simple pattern.

My first idea for this painting was to place the scene on a winter windy landscape with trees. I was not really sure about it and after a little wondering, one morning the idea of the spiral stair came to my mind. I thought it was just perfect to add a psychological dimension to the scene. Since I was a little kid, spirals and stairs have been two of my obsessions. All my life I’ve had a recurring dream where I am going up stairs at my grandparents’ old flat in Madrid and I always feel scared of the heights.

This recurring dream used to be really scary and frustrating for me. However, something good must happened deep in my mind because during the painting of this work, one night I dreamed of it again and for the very first time the experience was beautiful and fun. I know it sounds absolutely absurd but it was Louis Armstrong -instead of Cab Calloway- heading a troupe of cheerful music hall dancers wearing feathers upstairs. And they were all singing an ever ending improvisation of Minnie The Moocher’s “Hidee-Hidee-Hidee-hi” along the way up until we reached a room in the top of the stairs where a party started. Pretty funny!

When I was younger, I used to suffer from vertigo. It became a big issue when I worked at the theater as a light technician during the early 90’s. I had to climb up to the top of the building to place the focuses and I would always feel like passing out. I managed to get rid of this issue with therapy. I also remember that one of the most scary experiences in my life was going up the spiral stairs of The Sacred Family cathedral in Barcelona. This was also an inspiration for this work. The feeling of panic while climbing up these never ending stairs in a sort of state of trance, like if it was an hypnotic journey through the heights. It was something frightening and spiritual at the same time.

During the making of this illustration, I listened a lot to Steve Hacket’s albums, such as “Dark Town” and “Spectral Mornings”. Also a little bit of Bauhaus and Peter Hammill. They were two rainy weeks and I guess this also influenced my work, because I especially love to listen to this kind of music in the winter.

Original vector drawing of “The Mesmerizer”

This is the vector version of the main figure. After drawing the first sketches on paper I usually get them scanned and then trace it in vectors. Then, I export the vectorial image and I paint on it. As I have said in former posts, this process makes me feel free to do changes and try different things on each part I’m working on.

Detail of “The Mesmerizer”

I still don’t know what is going to be of this illustration because I basically did it as a sample of my work for my new portfolio. Is possible that sometime I can use it for a short story or some personal book project because in this moment it doesn’t fit any of the book projects I’m working on. Most probably, I will get it printed in cards and I also plan to do posters in the future, so it can be appreciated in full detail. The original illustration is 60 cms. high. In this image you can see the details of the hand that you won’t be able to see in the regular online image.

Following the series of posts about the building of this web site, I have the pleasure of introducing you the Eenkeeners. They are these little guys messing up my web site, in the top of the side menu and some other places.

I originally created these characters for my children’s book in works about home monsters, from which I already shown the illustration of Amgonnaitya. Of all the monsters at home, Eenkeeners are the ones I fear the most. They are the most annoying thing on earth! They mess up my work all of the time, especially when I leave the chair for a tea or when I visit the bathroom. So whenever I get back to work all my drawings and sketches are full of ink spots, spoiling my work. They make me feel so frustrated!

I understand that it may not be their fault. It’s just the nature of their race and I should be more understanding because these little creatures drop ink from their noses every time they get excited. And they usually do when they see I’m working and see my drawings. After all they are good people, you know; they just like my drawings! But I cannot stop them from messing up my work.

So, I have tried about everything to get rid of them or at least make them quit their bad behavior. I have talked to them politely, tried to make them feel pity for a poor illustrator, blackmail them with Basque food, try to get them adopted by other illustrators, etc…

If you have any idea about how to get rid of them, your suggestion will be very welcome. I need help!

From the first moment I thought about building my own web site I decided I wanted to do everything as personal and customized as I could. Fonts are one of the most important aspects in web design and sadly the possibilities of customizing are very short because of impossibility of the browsers today to recognize a font that is not installed in the user’s computer. It is possible though to customize small portions of text with a technique that we’ve been using at Intuitive Designs for different web design projects. I have to say that I am not a professional font designer, although I have designed a few fonts before. I just thought it could be interesting to share the way I build my own web site, and this is another part of the process.

The first step to build my own customized font was to make a sample sheet with my own script, which I did using a special calligraphy pen that I’ like to use to write personal letters and special signatures. So I did several versions of each letter in the alphabet in order to have different options to pick. I did samples of all of them, including caps, as well as special punctuation signs that I may use and other symbols. Then I got them all scanned and did a selection on the computer.

Once I have all the sample letters selected I edited them one by one with a vector program, cleaned them and made them even. It is very important at this stage to use a geometric grid to compare all letters and made them even. Hand writing is not something really even: every letter in the paper is different, and it is great to keep this kind of sense of imperfection in the scripture in order to make it appear believable. In the other hand, it’s very important to keep a sense of balance and consistency between all the letters. Especially in terms of proportions and angle, or they would look like been written by different people.

After having all my individual letters clean, I put tested them by writing different combinations of vowels and consonants and see how they work together. This is a long process that requires to get them corrected again and again, especially the spacing between the letters. Another important aspect to keep in mind is how much vertical space the letters develop. Letters like T, L, J and G need a lot of care and attention so they won’t invade the upper and lower lines in the paragraph.

For building the font I particularly used Font Creator but there are other programs you may use to create fonts. I copied and pasted the letters from vector to this program and then got them adjusted and re-scaled.

Finally, when I got my font installed and full working, the next step was to make the font work in my web site. I have to say that my wife Naomi did this for me because she is the specialist in our design studio in these matters. Naomi used a script called sIFR that you can download and learn how to use at Mike Davidson’s sIFR. Basically, it works by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. The guys who developed it did a wonderful contribution to the web design for sure!

So, that’s pretty much how it looks, all you can see in the menu and headings in the web site are not images but actually html that is fully recognized by search engines. Pretty cool! And the most important, for me, is to be able to have my own signature and my own personality in my web site. Like a real footprint. After all, I think if more artists and designers would customize more their web sites the Internet would be a more exciting and personal place. The whole process was really long and it meant quite a lot of work, but I think it is really worthwhile since my calligraphy will always be the same and now I’m going to be able to use it in my computer for the rest of my life.

Note: The final design of this web site will be posted in a couple of weeks and you won’t be able to see the font working until the new design is up. Please be patient.