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…