ABOUT HBSS

HYBRID SKETCHES

Born in the cold part of Brazil, grandson of railway workers and coal miners, I grew up among schematics and construction sites. From my father, a civil engineer, I inherited an interest in technology and the enthusiasm of grand projects. From the public library I inherited Maupassant and Borges, Poe and Lovecraft, Bradbury and Asimov without order or criteria.

Moving a lot, drawing was a big part of my early life: whole days spent with pencil and paper. My father taught me to read floorplans, decompose solids, and create simple perspectives when I was young. It was one of the things we shared.

But I stopped.

I became an engineer and followed an academic path, publishing in technical journals and collaborating on science communication projects. I wrote essays, articles, opinion pieces, all those serious things that matter. Two decades without putting pencil to paper for anything but work.

Why I Returned

In 2019, I lost my father. Months later, the pandemic struck, and the end of the world seemed fitting. But you all know this has been a long apocalypse. So at over fifty years old, trying to pass time between remote work during lockdown I found years old sketches and decided to digitize them. Then I decided to learn digital drawing. Then I participated in Inktober 2022 to force myself to use my Wacom tablet, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

The Process

It usually starts with a sketch, in a sketchbook or Procreate. If I like it, it may become an image with a caption. More rarely, the story concept comes first, the image later.

The ones that really grab me get complete narratives, with keyframes of videos and text. Longer stories I write in Portuguese. Some of them may spend a lot of time in written form before returning to any visual media.

Make it Exist, then Make it Pretty

Hybrid from the Start

My process has always been hybrid. I decompose scenes into layers, at minimum foreground and background. I use sketches for the first, volumetric studies for the second.

Then my pipeline branches:

Digital drawing: I mainly use Procreate nowadays. These are long worldbuilding projects and studies. The entire final illustration series for Phileas and The Gentleman Troll, for example, is hand-drawn.
Hybrid digital art: My hybrid workflow usually starts with a photocomposition, I draw, morph and edit over it, then use that rough version to generate assets through diffusion (AI). After adjusting and iterating each element I put all together and refine further. AI tools like upscaling, inpainting and outpainting are used in many of these steps.

I found out this manages to annoy digital illustrators and puzzle AI artists (why do this roundabout way?). But let them be annoyed and confused. I use clear tags and make time-lapses showing each step. Not that it appeases haters, but it helps me remember and improve. At my age that is very handy.

Animation: I usually create twenty or thirty keyframes (purely drawn or photobashed with AI) for a complete story (like Sanctuary or Webwoman). Beyond Ferma was the longer full story and took six times this much.

Purists don't like it, but it keeps me curious, and curiosity is what brought me back.

What You´ll Find Here

Ideas turn into images, images into stories, stories into videos. Some grow into complete narratives. Some become fictional universes I keep expanding.

Most of it lives on Instagram. Some I managed to organize here.

Thank you for visiting. Make yourself at home.

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