Aégis Illustration, 2014: A Year in Review

Aégis Illustration, 2014: A Year in Review

Well, first of all, I hope you all are having a nice beginning of 2015! It’s been a while since the last time I posted anything here… Which doesn’t mean that the engine has been turned off! Quite the opposite :).

I have spent the last quarter of the year designing quite some albums for some great metal bands (Illuminata, Gloomball or Heonia, to name a few) that will soon see the light of day. And of course, I took a super well deserved two weeks break to visit my family in the other corner of the country.

It’s been an hectic year. I have been flooded with work pretty much all of it and I even broke my right hand in an accident. Such fun! I have had to sacrifice enough time to create illustrations on my own, including the fact of needing the fresh air of exploring other medias and styles, and slowly leaving to a second plane my most-common realistic photo manipulations to expand my digital art collection. I’ve been investigating instead of creating. I think it’s starting to pay off. Right now I am trying to find the time to keep producing a small surprise in the shape of a poster series. I won’t reveal a thing until it’s finished, but I promise it won’t be anything you might expect from this studio!

So, I have been thinking it could be a good idea to do a retrospective of my artistic year. Since I hardly look to the past about these things, I found myself surprised of being able of analyzing the evolution I have had in 2014, with all the illustrations in the same place and the chance to see them all in a glance. Maybe most people do these kind of good practices to themselves… But I don’t tend to be a very obvious person 8)

Enough blabbering, I bet you prefer to take a look of this digital art collection!

Digital Art Collection 2014

“Stubborn” was made with pics I discarded from a photo session, and it was very fun and relaxing to do, since the base idea was good enough and aesthetically, I wouldn’t need much work.

Well, the usual “Aégis image” of the year, since there weren’t much (if any more) of them. Tried to get a colorful image with lots of reflections, to make contrast with the message of the illustration. I created this one on purpose for the exhibition “REDemption” of the collective Hysterical Minds.

This one was a hell to complete. It was created also for Hysterical Minds exhibition. The photos were shot in La Granja (Segovia, Spain), with my poor Eduardo posing nude with some celsius degrees below zero. I didn’t expect it would become such a nightmare to blend all the photos. It took a few months to complete. Not very thrilled with the final result.

I started this one in 2013. I had a hard time deciding the final color palette and some minor things in post-production, because at this time I was starting to feel a bit exhausted of doing the same style over and over again, and I was starting to need a real change. Nonetheless, I did end up very satisfied with the outcome, although I wonder when I will return to create this kind of artworks.

This was a quick one, just for fun. I just sold it for the cover of the new single of Mass Sky Raid.

Well, this one. I had started it like a hundred years ago, in a desperate chance of finding a new way of working, being bored of my usual stylisms. When I visited my fellow friend and designer Victor Murillo in Castellón (Spain) in June, for teaching in a workshop in the School of Arts, I knew he could be the one to give some shape to it. And I was right. We took the image on and off during the days I stayed there, and although the final outcome was quite dull in content, it was aesthetically something we ended up very proud of.

Again, the process of this one took more than expected. Wanted something visually striking but keeping the elements to a minimum.

I had the pleasure of collaborating with my friend David Mena from Melez AW in one of the images of his new series, “Not All a Dream”, that he published this year.

At some point of the year I remembered that my series “Internal Landscapes” were not finished yet, and I tried to do something about it. At the end, I played so much with the image that it no longer could fit on the series, so I released it separately. It was recently adquired by the band The Reality of Yourself as the cover of their new album.

I had the smoke heart created from some other artwork (on which I never used it), and then I had this idea about entropy, energy and distopy represented with an impossible love. Model was courtesy of Marcus Ranum.

But then I decided I was already tired of my existential crisis about style, and decided to give it a twist with this image, using some random ideas of multiple sketches and minor things I’d had been doing during 2014.

And developed it a bit further returning to actual drawing. I felt liberated.

So as of now, these last three illustrations sum up pretty well the artistic evolution I’m taking right now, and that you’ll witness when I release the poster series I was talking about. Time will tell…!

Soon, I’ll update the blog with a new review I’m writing about the commercial projects I have been developing during 2014, including some of the best CDs and books I’ve got the honour to design, as well as a glimpse of other great moments for the studio during the year, like my appearance in several workshops all over the world and some of the best features and prizes that were received! 😀

Stay tuned!