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  • 5 Sumi-e Illustrators and Painters To Follow
    Illustration

    5 Sumi-e Illustrators and Painters To Follow

    Discover the books, artists, and films to add to your reference library for Japanese art Whether you already have a project in mind or are looking for ideas to inspire your next creation, getting to know and studying the work of other creatives will always help to awaken your imagination. Illustrators Mika Takahashi and Flor Kaneshiro share a selection of inspirational artists using Indian ink and watercolor to create Japanese-style illustration and sumi-e painting. Flor Kaneshiro’s Influences Flor Kaneshiro (@florkaneshiro) is an Argentinian illustrator specializing in traditional Japanese illustration. Her work features chiefly in video and editorial illustration projects.

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  • Meet Visual Development Artist Samuel Smith
    Illustration

    Meet Visual Development Artist Samuel Smith

    He worked as a color artist on Klaus, the animated film that tells a different version of the legend of Santa Claus Samuel Smith (@samuelsmith) is a French independent illustrator and visual development artist for animation. As a visual development artist, Samuel’s job is to translate the director’s vision into images, focusing specifically on light and color. He paints color keys–reference images that prioritize details such as lighting and material–that serve as guides for the lighting department so that they can work out how to light a certain scene. Color key artists have similar roles to background artists; however, they focus on these specific details. After studying at a 3D Art School, Samuel’s big break came when he was hired by SPA Studios in Spain to work on their first movie, Klaus, as a color artist. He spent a year and a half painting more than 450 color keys, learning a lot about light, cinematography, and movie-making.

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  • Domestika Diary: Hugo Barros Costa
    Illustration

    Domestika Diary: Hugo Barros Costa

    The Portuguese architect, illustrator, and urban sketcher takes us on a tour through the streets of the city he has called home for years, Valencia, taking us to the places that inspire him most First, there were the buildings, the attractive details of the facades, the lush roofs, and the ingenious solutions achieved by so many architects throughout history. Then, the surrounding landscape, the trees, the street benches, and public spaces. Finally, the people arrived: the everyday protagonists of the scenes that make a city come to life. For years, these elements have combined to broaden the vision of Portuguese architect Hugo Barros Costa (@yolahugo) in his home of Valencia, as an artist, an illustrator, and an urban sketcher. In the most recent episode of the Domestika Diaries series, Hugo takes us on a tour of the places in Valencia that inspire him to create the drawings that have brought him fame and exhibitions in many different countries, opening up his creative process to us. In addition to his work as an artist, he teaches at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de la Universitat Politècnica de València and at the prestigious Parsons in New York. Discover more in the video:

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  • Fito Espinosa: 3 Creative Approaches
    Illustration

    Fito Espinosa: 3 Creative Approaches

    Be inspired by the work of this Peruvian artist and illustrator Fito Espinosa (@fitoespinosa) has been cultivating his prolific portfolio for 25 years in painting, illustration, and ceramics. In the last few years, he has also contributed to advertising campaigns, participated in collective and individual exhibitions, as well as a number of painting competitions, many of which he has won. He has published five books and collaborated on a number of other publications. Below, we present a collection of his vibrant and varied art.

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  • Challenge: Can You Paint a Portrait with Just One Color?
    Illustration

    Challenge: Can You Paint a Portrait with Just One Color?

    Alejandro Casanova takes on the latest Domestika Challenge: can he paint a portrait with only green watercolors? How does one bring a face to life using only one color? How do you build features, the shadows, and textures without being able to use anything but green? Of course, patience and mastery are needed, virtues that can only be learned with constant practice and which Alejandro "Ale" Casanova (@casanova_ale), a multi-award winning painter and teacher, has plenty of. In the following video, Casanova faces the Domestika Challenge: will he be able to paint a watercolor portrait using only green watercolors? Find out below:

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  • Free Download: Easy Doodle Exercises to Learn to Draw
    Illustration

    Free Download: Easy Doodle Exercises to Learn to Draw

    Puño shares with you easy exercises to warm up your hand Puño (@puno) is an educator and illustrator who has worked in advertising, animation, photography and editorial illustration, including the publication of several books of his authorship. Puño teaches daily to draw that they thought would never be possible, and he trusts that the idea is to simply lose his fear of the sheet and the pencil.

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  • Self-Publishing: An Art and a Challenge
    Illustration

    Self-Publishing: An Art and a Challenge

    Cartoonist and screenwriter Albert Monteys has some advice for those who want to publish their own work independently Albert Monteys (@albertmonteys) is a cartoonist and comic scriptwriter with more than 25 years of experience. He was trained in fanzines and spent almost two decades at the weekly illustrated satirical El Jueves, which he also directed for four years. He then embarked on digital comic projects such as Orgullo y Satisfacción and "Universo!", the latter being nominated for an Eisner Award, and winner of the Best National Comic Award at the Barcelona Comic Fair (2019).

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  • How to Find Images When Creating a Digital Collage
    Illustration

    How to Find Images When Creating a Digital Collage

    Learn about different sources of royalty-free pictures and learn to search by color or resolution Israel G. Vargas (@israelgevargas) is a Mexican designer and visual communicator who graduated from the UNAM Faculty of Arts and Design. As an editorial designer, he has worked for different Mexican magazines, including Picnic, where he was a graphic editor for seven years. Israel is also an illustrator whose work has been featured in various international magazines and brands such as Wired, Texas Monthly, Atlanta, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Adidas, Tbrand Studio from The New York Times and Metaleap Creative, as well as in Mexican publications such as Tierra Adentro, Expansión, Accent, and Chilango.

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  • Domestika Diary: Catalina Estrada
    Teacher Illustration

    Domestika Diary: Catalina Estrada

    The Colombian graphic designer shares her creative routine and the landscapes that have inspired her to create her award-winning prints. Catalina Estrada has only been in Colombia a few months. Having lived for years in Barcelona, she became stranded in her home country while visiting her mother. Not that she’s complaining, since the varied landscapes, lush colors, and natural beauty of Colombia are where she draws much of the inspiration behind her internationally award-winning prints. The stylish graphic designer and illustrator says that beauty and optimism are the trademarks of her work, thanks to her experience growing up surrounded by these striking landscapes. In this Domestika Diary, recorded in her home in Colombia, she shares how her surroundings have impacted and enriched her creative work.

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  • Ana Victoria Calderón’s Favorite Watercolor Painting Materials
    Illustration

    Ana Victoria Calderón’s Favorite Watercolor Painting Materials

    Ana Victoria Calderón shares her favorite materials for illustrating with watercolor To browse Ana Victoria Calderon’s work (@anavictoriana) is to submerge yourself in a world of watercolor illustration. She creates little universes with ink and water on all kinds of canvases–collaborating with brands and publications around the globe. We spoke to her about her favorite materials so we could share the tips and tricks of a seasoned pro and help you get the right material for your own watercolor creations.

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  • Challenge: Make a Digital Illustration Look Handmade in 10 Minutes
    Teacher Illustration

    Challenge: Make a Digital Illustration Look Handmade in 10 Minutes

    Alex de Marcos, illustrator and expert in digital painting techniques, faces the Domestika Challenge Alex de Marcos' career is broad and varied: he has worked in everything from editorial illustration to advertising, and regularly collaborates with major international brands such as Nike, Oysho, Movistar, Levi's and Ron Barceló. In this Challenge Domestika, the illustrator puts all his skills and experience to the test: he has just 10 minutes to make a digital illustration look like it was made using traditional methods by hand. Will he succeed? Find out in the following video:

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  • Simple Exercises for Drawing Perspective
    Illustration

    Simple Exercises for Drawing Perspective

    Puño shares three useful exercises that will help beginners to get better at drawing perspective When it comes to drawing, there are some universal rules based on how human beings perceive things and their cultural norms. Whether you choose to respect these rules, break them, or experiment with them, there’s no doubt that they are essential for every illustrator. One of these rules is perspective, a technique in figurative art to show the volume, location, and position of an object or person depicted in a drawing. It allows the viewer to see the subject in three dimensions and understand its shape.

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  • How to Learn the Chiaroscuro Technique in 7 min (TUTORIAL)
    Teacher Illustration

    How to Learn the Chiaroscuro Technique in 7 min (TUTORIAL)

    Learn from Marco Mazzoni how to create perfect highlights and shadows on portraits In art, chiaroscuro is the use of strong contrasts between light and shadow, creating depth and drama. Adding a sense of volume, it not only fleshes out the artwork’s subject but also draws the viewer’s eye to it. Artists well-known for their use of this technique include Goya, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio, and it is still very much in use, not only in paintings but also in cinema and photography. In this tutorial, artist and illustrator Marco Mazzoni (@marcomazzoniart) demonstrates how you can transform a simple drawing of a face using the chiaroscuro technique to add shadows and depth. Using just a pencil and piece of paper, the result can either be an artwork in itself or serve as the base layer for a more detailed and colorful composition.

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  • Botanical Illustration Tutorial: How To Draw A Tree
    Teacher Illustration

    Botanical Illustration Tutorial: How To Draw A Tree

    Learn step by step how to draw a tree from references and combine different techniques and processes with Paulina Maciel Botanical illustration, whether realistic or fantastical, is one of the most beautiful styles a creative can practice, thanks to the abundance of colors, the ability to enhance our powers of observation, and the multiplicity of applications, from editorial design to story illustration, packaging design and other graphic needs. In this tutorial, Paulina Maciel (@pau_maciel), the designer and illustrator behind Canela Estudio, explains how to draw and paint a tree from scratch, with a very simple method, using materials available to everyone. Discover it in the video below:

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  • 3 Drawing Challenges That Will Unlock Your Creativity
    Illustration

    3 Drawing Challenges That Will Unlock Your Creativity

    Adolfo Serra shares exercises that will encourage you to imagine, play, and experiment, and unlock your creativity Chance, mistakes, games, limits, and freedom: all can serve to help you unleash your imagination, create a language, and find your voice. In this video, illustrator Adolfo Serra (@adolfoserra) shares three drawing challenges that will push you to experiment with manual techniques and unlock your creativity. Gather up all the art materials you have at home; it’s time to put your creativity to the test.

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  • Free Download: Color Tips for Drawing with Pencils
    Illustration

    Free Download: Color Tips for Drawing with Pencils

    Learn tricks to improve your coloring process with Marco Mazzoni Marco Mazzoni (@marcomazzoniart) is and artist and illustrator. Experimenting with the boundaries of fine art using pencils has been a passion of Marco’s since he was a student. He tells a compelling story through his pencil portraits, drawing inspiration from Sardinian mysticism and the plants that he began sketching as a boy.

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  • How to Capture a City's Personality
    Illustration

    How to Capture a City's Personality

    Architect and artist Carlos Stanga teaches how to find the soul of a city for your illustrations Architectural illustration can provide a unique connection to urban space. It's a way to capture a moment or a building in time and to express creatively how a place makes you feel. Artist and architect Carlo Stanga (@carlo_stanga) has done precisely that with the streets of Milan, London, or New York, to name a few, and has some tips you can follow to capture the soul of cityscapes in your illustrations.

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  • Combat Writer’s Block with This Technique to Beat the Blank Page
    Illustration

    Combat Writer’s Block with This Technique to Beat the Blank Page

    Learn to write stories in a fun and simple way with Natalia Méndez’s creative dice Overcoming the fear of the blank page has never been easy: thinkers, artists, and writers have been faced with creative block throughout history. Fear of failure, a lack of ideas, or the feeling that nobody will be interested in what you have to say, are among the many sentiments that leave us feeling lost and unable to continue our work. Editor and teacher of children's literature Natalia Méndez (@natumendez) explains how to combat creative block by creating dice with ideas and concepts inscribed on their faces to inspire new stories. We explain it step by step below.

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  • Adding Watercolor to Your Sketchbook Drawings
    Illustration

    Adding Watercolor to Your Sketchbook Drawings

    Mattias Adolfsson shows you how a hint of color will take your sketches to the next level and add depth Mattias Adolfsson (@mattiasadolfsson) is an illustrator living in a small town in Sweden, called Sigtuna, just outside of Stockholm. As a young adult, Mattias studied engineering and architecture before switching to graphic design, all the while continuing to draw in his spare time and develop his own unique style. During his degree, he became interested in 3D modeling, using it to build his own universes and tell fantastical stories. For his thesis project, he used 3D design and animation to create a visual piece about three cosmonauts traveling to Mars–a story he had developed over many years in his sketchbook. After graduating from university with a master’s in graphic design, Mattias worked for a decade in the computer games industry. In 2007, he left Electronic Arts to become a freelance illustrator. Since then, he has been commissioned by the likes of WIRED, Google, The New Yorker, Nickelodeon, Hollywood Reporter, Cartoon Network, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Disney, Amnesty International, and many more.

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  • Domestika Creatives: Edel Rodriguez
    Illustration

    Domestika Creatives: Edel Rodriguez

    We talked to the artist and illustrator responsible for some of Time Magazine's most emblematic covers, Edel Rodriguez At the age of 26, Edel Rodriguez became Time Magazine's youngest ever art director for both their Canadian and Latin American editions. This extraordinary achievement is just one part of the fascinating life of one of the most interesting artists in America, a multidisciplinary creative who has created emblematic covers, illustrated children's books, and worked on posters for theater and cinema. A brilliant career in which his Cuban origins have played an essential role and which, in recent years, has gained acclaim due to his brilliant work as a cover artist on the policies of the Trump administration. Rodríguez is the author of some of Time's most popular (and, above all, most political) covers but his career is much more than this. We took the opportunity to interview him in New York, at the School of Visual Arts, to go over the milestones of his life and learn about his working philosophy. Watch our conversation below:

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  • Free Theoretical Guide for Manga Characters Creation
    Illustration

    Free Theoretical Guide for Manga Characters Creation

    Get your Japanese comic book project going and learn how to design your characters Andrea Jen (@andrea_jen) is an Argentinian illustrator and author specialized in manga creation. Since 2010 she has made almost a dozen publications in this genre, and has won important recognizing such as the Silent Manga Audition Masterclass Certificate (2017). For her, the most important thing in a manga project is the creation of the characters that will star in the core idea or concept that you have in mind. "What do you want to tell?". It's the first question that according to this artist you should ask yourself, so that you can get down to work and define the universe of characters that will tell the story for you by answering questions such as "What are their ideals?", "What moves them?" or "What experiences have marked you?".

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  • How to Make a Rotoscope Animation in Photoshop
    Illustration

    How to Make a Rotoscope Animation in Photoshop

    Learn how to create an animation with the rotoscope technique using Adobe Photoshop in just six steps Rotoscoping is a technique that involves redrawing a shape—tracing each scene with any drawing technique—frame by frame, based on a sequence of real action images, like a video clip. This generates a silhouette with realistic movement that can be used as a reference to animate a character. The technique was used in films such as A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life by Richard Linklater. One of the experts in this technique is Gonzalo Cordero (@gonzalo_cordero), illustrator, animator, and motionographer who will teach us how to create a rotoscope animation in Adobe Photoshop, which is the perfect way to familiarize yourself with this kind of animation.

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  • Free Download: Stages to Complete a Painting with Ink and Watercolor
    Illustration

    Free Download: Stages to Complete a Painting with Ink and Watercolor

    Illustrator Alex Hillkurtz shares a visual guide of the stages used in watercolor and ink painting Alex Hillkurtz (@alexhillkurtzart) was born in England and grew up in California where he is a renowned storyboard artist for feature films, television, and commercials. His film credits include Argo, Almost Famous, It’s Complicated, and many others. He uses the language of cinema to compose his images, moving beyond what one sees and depicting what he wants others to see. He believes that in our overly crowded lives, sketching and painting invites us to move at a more deliberate pace, giving us a true sense of place, where unexpected stories are revealed.

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  • 5 Essential Courses to Start Your Sketchbook Habit
    Illustration

    5 Essential Courses to Start Your Sketchbook Habit

    Take your sketching and creativity to another level with these experts The sketchbook is the perfect tool to develop as a creative. Regardless of your experience, it is a medium to develop in almost any creative discipline. Establishing the habit of always having your sketchbook with you will help you create surprising and innovative projects. Start to fill one up right now with ideas, sketches, watercolors, and anything else that might occur to you with the help of these five experts.

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  • What Is Exploded View Drawing?
    Illustration

    What Is Exploded View Drawing?

    Learn all about this illustration style used in industrial design and architecture Exploded View is a technical drawing style that shows the individual parts or the assembly order of an object as a diagram. While it’s often used for patenting objects, it first appeared during the Renaissance, and today is also a popular illustration style that is used to create interesting images that don't necessarily guide the assembly of an object. What is it used for? In industrial design, this drawing style helps designers, engineers, manufacturers, and artisans get a three-dimensional, explanatory view of the different parts of an object. Usually, the diagram gives instructions on how to assemble the object, which you’ve probably seen examples of in manuals explaining how to put together a piece of furniture.

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