I made this one a while ago. Never fully completed it. I made it thinking about terrorism. I guess it depends on the viewer to think who is the terrorist here. But my mind is close to this drawing.
And as I think an important feature to be considered a monster is to cause fear, here is mine for Illustration Friday. A little red terrorist riding hood. Some people might think they are small and weak. But they can cause a lot of death. It's not always only the wolf who's dangerous, but if he didn't attack in the first place, the girl wouldn't probably even need a gun. Oh the eternal debate about counter-terrorism...

I made this drawing (the pencil part of it, anyway) one late night, or should I say early morning, under the dim light of sunrise coming through shady curtains, almost without sleep. I was thinking about how our ideas work, and this image speaks about two of them.

One idea is that most times is not the object of our love itself what we're in love of, but the idea we have of it. This is truly a need, because our idea fits our own head better, and what's even more, we have it anytime we need it. This can happen with a person. You love the idea you have of the person you love. This is not saying you don't really love the person, of course you do. But it's the mental construction we make of that person what really attracts you. A good example is this: if your loved one betrays your confidence in any way, you think "I don't know you." when that's not entirely right. You really know that person, but the idea you had of him or her doesn't work anymore. You don't believe it. That's what has been stolen from you, not the person. You'll have to choose what you care most, after, but that's another issue.

The other idea is that it happens not only with people, but also with goals, and simple things. You can have a clear idea of some achievement you wish to comply in the future, and that idea can keep you warm, can give you strengh, can feed you without being really food, until you reach it. It can be the dream of a house of your own, or something as small as a new finished drawing for posting online. It can keep you alive for years, or distracted and working for an entire night. You idea can keep you warm in the middle of tiny iceberg, naked, drifting on a chilly sea. It can be that powerful. It can even make you smile in between.

Whatever you ideas might be, love them. Hug them even if they seem to be ment never to be real. Even if they sometimes hurt you so much you think you can't keep living with them. I can asure you, that's no life living without them.

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This time, I had the idea of making a time lapse capture of my screen while I worked on this piece. It took one frame per second, and now it plays back at 15 fps, so you can say you're watching it 15 times faster than it happened. Then this morning, looking for background music to put to it, I thought even if my spoken english is really bad, it might be understandable in context, so I give it a shot. It wasn't good, of course, but I was decided not to employ more time on the "making of" than on the proper illustration so... here it is. I hope you find it interesting to see the process. Any feedback will surely be taken into account for future remakes.

My first attempt at making something with Illustrator. That stupid thing took me like 40 minutes, pfeew. It's supposed to be an alien scarf who came to take revenge. I suppose I'm a photoshop guy.
I also been playing again with art.com's artPad flash feature. You can see me making this brushy version down here:

The idea behind those two is that scarfs all around us are in fact aliens that plan to conquer the world by passing as normal woolen scarf and then suddenly in a snap choke us all to death. I know, they don't care much about the tropic people. They have other evil plans for them...

Desde hace algunos años que vengo juntando pilas, en su mayoría AA, para no tirarlas con la basura normal. Con la creencia dormida de que cuando llegaran a una masa considerable iba a tener una alternativa ecológica, o al menos lógica, para desecharlas. No pretendía tanto de mi país (o de mi ciudad por lo menos) como para reciclar sus materiales, pero al menos alguna forma de depositarlas que no fuera peligroso para el suelo, y principalmente para el agua subterránea. Pero esta tarde hice un poco de investigación, leí algunas páginas y comentarios al respecto, y parece que en Argentina la posición oficial es que las tires con tu basura doméstica nomás. De hecho entendí que si junto demasiadas y después las tiro todas juntas es un delito, por que estaría contaminando. Jás. Argentina, mi país. Le escribí un mail a una sección del Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires preguntándole por este asunto, así que en cuanto tenga alguna respuesta o solución oficial al respecto actualizaré este post.
En algunos lados mencionan que se las pueden dar a empresas de construcción que las tiran en los rellenos de concreto o cemento, así quedan por lo menos aisladas. No sé si esto es así, y no sé si me voy a tomar la molestia. Hace rato que no junto casi más, hace por lo menos cuatro años que no compro más pilas salvo las recargables. No sólo creo que generan menos desperdicio (aún si son más tóxicas) sino que a la larga me salen mucho mas económicas.
O sea, si alguno tiene alguna idea al respecto por favor díganla.

Inspired by a post on Poly's blog, I've spent some minutes of my life drawing on some of those flash pages that "show your drawing to your friends!" ok, sort of. My first attempt was last due to a mistakenly pressed clear buttom, so the second one was even more sketchy. Then I remembered about one called Artpad that had more tools available, and give it another try:

It's about killing innocent leaves when we do some gardening until... you cut the golden leaf! MHUAHAHAHA... ok, just click to see how it was painted "live". One fun thing about Artpad is that you can modify over my work by clicking on add to this painting. If you happen to do so, please post the results here, because that would be fun, and interesting.

He's almost the best inspector on earth. He sometimes miscounts the number of toes on footprints, which has caused some unsolved cases. That doesn't happen to Grissom.
Illustration Friday's topic feet.

Reading about this year's Flashforward found this nominee, a very interesting and useful online reference flash of the human face called ARTnatomy/ARTnatomía, muscles, expressions, etc. Very detailed, very clear, very good. It inspired me to try to reproduce the expressions indicated there, but on a fast sketchy tehet. And you can see the results.

Inspired by Illustration Friday's topic of this week: tatoo. I understand it as a mark that we choose to carry and that we don't want to ever go away. Just like when you find the woman of your life.

Once in a dream she learned how not to fight the wind. Next morning she stepped out to the sidewalk, and the late summer windgot into her dress, and made her float, fly across the blocks, through the city, touching the top of the trees with her bare toes. One morning after she didn't even need the wind.

Oh my, this is da shizzle. A japanese technique to fold a shirt on a few simple and smooth steps. See it on Google Video.

Done for this monday's assigment at the Coso de Ilustradores collective blog. In this particular case the chosen topic was a poetry, Juanito Laguna by Leicia Gotlibowski. It's in spanish, but my own text (which appears on the image) reads:

the things that lying around have no value
become ideas on the pockets of Juan
and grow, and come out,
even if some people don't see them.

This morning I was going trough my feeds and discovered a beautiful and interesting short film, thanks to the Official Google Video Blog. It's been nominated for the Oscar it seems, and is a mixture of video with composition but also with manual photographic and printing weird effects. You should give it a peek. Very german expressionist. I give it five hats.

A postcard made more than a year ago, now featured here for Illustration Friday's this week's topic: insect. You can buy this as a postcard at dA Prints.