23

It's done. It's been more than two days since I started making this illustration. The background is the following: this friday (tomorrow) I have to submit this image to be included in the humble exposition of the Illustrators' Forum of Argentina, on its stand, together with like a hundred fellow illustrators, on this year's Children's Book Fair. The image is thought to be printed at 50x40cm, 300dpi, so that's the size the original PSD has. It's huge (at least to what I'm used to) and it's very heavy, so it was the first real artistic test for my Athlon64, and it proved excellent. It has been quite a pleasure. As my method, I took the hard path for me, it's completely done in Photoshop CS with my good old Wacom, and two brushes: the basic one (gotta love it) and a basic round very soft one, for shading. It has 23 layers, counting backgrounds, different characters, special effects, characters' shadows, characters' shadings, dodging, curves, and photo filter. I can assure you this is the most detailed and longer image to make so far (by me, of course), and now that the time to submit it has come, a big grin comes to my face, while Gaspar keeps running on his wire sky blue exercise wheel. Good fellow, this Gaspar. Anyway, the exposition had a fixed theme, and it was "circus". Needless to say, I hate the circus, specially the clowns. It's not fear, by any means, it's just a strong sense of aesthetic disgust to the whole thing. But I had to draw something circussy if I wanted to get into the whole thing, so this was my idea: instead of the circus being in the arena, all the circus people, animals, etc are the public, and they're watching a proper show, the imagination of a child while reading a book. You already know I love books, and reading. Well, in fact I also like to imagine things. Can you remember your imagination when you were a kid? Mine was gorgeous. I thought of some weird and incredible things, I've dreamed of thousand adventures, and smiled a lot because of that. With time your imagination usually gets stucked. The thing is you've seen more things than when you were just seven years old. You're seeing all the time (unless you're blind, but that's not the point) and those things you see start to be part of the building blocks of your imagination. So you start to use them more and more, and get very used to it. While being a kid you fly more. You can draw things you won't understand yourself in some years, you use pure imagination to form your ideas, and that's why they usually don't work on the real world. Some people don't even notice how their ideas diminish in size and quality over the years. Those people are getting old fast. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you're suddenly see some of those fresh ideas rising from your head. With luck, you'll recognize it, and with ever more fortune you'll be able to do something with it. Perhaps drawing it. Submit it to dA then, here we are, to see it.