ILLUSTRATION

When one of my favorite bands announced a new album and a fan-led magazine project for the upcoming tour, I saw an opportunity to combine my passion for their music with the skills I’ve honed in graphic design. My goal was to create an art piece that felt personal, striking, and worthy of sharing with the band.

I began with a sketch of the band members, building contrast with bold highlights and shadows to give them a distinctive look. To make the piece dynamic, I incorporated elements inspired by their music videos — a jagged, cut-out sky, layered textures, and bold colors that evoke a sense of raw, handmade energy. Lyrics appear as cut-out letters, adding to the collage-like effect and reinforcing the album’s themes. The final composition breaks traditional boundaries, with some elements extending beyond the frame to make it visually engaging and unexpected. I wanted the piece to feel like it was created by someone piecing together fragments of inspiration — a reflection of the band’s own layered and complex sound.

I had the pleasure of designing a tattoo for my best friend, and years later I created one for myself. This feels extremely important and close to my heart to me, because my designs were etched onto skin twice and will remain there permanently.

Creating a tattoo for my best friend involved a lot of back and forth with her, since we were both young and this would be her first ever tattoo. She was certain of two things – she wanted to get a design of her favourite animal, the elephant, and she wanted it done on her back. This meant that I had a lot of creative freedom as to the finer details and the concept as a whole. I sketched out on paper first and then moved to Photoshop to refine it. We had a few rounds of revisions and, after she was happy with the result, she went and got it inked by a tattoo artist that she knew. I am eternally grateful for the trust she had in me to deliver something that would stay on her skin forever. The process images are on the left.

The process for making mine was a lot easier, since I knew exactly what I wanted and how it should look from the get-go. My late grandmother used to call me her “Sol de Primavera,” meaning spring sun in Spanish, and it means a lot to me to this day. I went into Photoshop from the jump this time and put it together, and two days later I went and got it. These images are on the right.

These images come from a study on bears that was meant to get me to explore different mediums, both traditional and digital. I wanted to push myself into exploring poses, textures, expressions, silhouettes, as well as positive and negative spaces. I have always loved illustrating, but up to this point I had been mostly self-taught. The graphic design program at Fanshawe allowed me to learn about a variety of mediums like the ones pictured below, but most importantly it helped me streamline the process from start to finish when it comes to creating pieces like the ones below. This is remarkably important as it helps artists become more efficient and achieve the piece they're looking to create in the most coherent way.

Among these, you can see my work with pencil, coloured pencils, watercolours, crayons, ink, and paint. Digitally, I worked with vectors, shapes, and multiple different Photoshop brushes.