Unicorn witch: the book of healing plants

ENG. This piece is from a dream I had about a centauride who protected a book from the fire she emanated to keep the heat of the medicinal plants she grew in her body. The book contained all the information about these healing plants, a map of all the seas, and a special section on how to heal a heart through collecting poppy seeds and blue notes. The centauride was a witch, a unicorn, a beast and she had the wisdom and strength of a thousand women.

♞ ♞ ♞ ♞ ♞

ESP. Esta ilustración es de un sueño que tuve acerca de una centauro que protegía un libro de las llamas que emanaban de su cuerpo usadas para mantener tibias las plantas medicinales que crecían en ella. El libro contenía toda la información de esas plantas curativas, un mar de los océanos y una sección especial donde se hablaba de cómo curar un corazón a través de recolectar semillas de amapola y notas musicales (de jazz). La centauro era bruja, unicornio y bestia, y tenía la sabiduría y la fortaleza de mil mujeres.

Disonancia I

Disonancia I: para atravesar una aurora boreal hay que arrancarse el corazón.

aledelatorre_auroraborealis1.jpg

Artery skein: My monster heart 

ENG. For this piece (Artery skein: My monster heart) I started with a couple of sketches, one very general and one in which I worked lights and shadows, but I felt that something was missing in the illustration, so I worked on a lot of new sketches until I found the right one. When I start inking, I usually use different thicknesses of pens, but this time I used only one and liked how it turned out. For the color palette I was inspired by bugambilias, in all those beautiful magenta and cherry shades.

☽  ☽  ☽  ☽  ☽

ESP. Este es una probadita del proceso creativo de Artery skein: My monster heart. Comencé con un par de bocetos, uno muy general y otro en el que trabajé luces y sombras, pero sentía que algo le faltaba a la ilustración, así que trabajé en varios bocetos más hasta que el dibujo salió tal como lo quería. Para la ilustración en tinta generalmente uso estilógrafos de diferentes grosores, pero esta vez usé sólo uno y me gustó mucho el resultado. Para la paleta de colores me inspiré en las bugambilias que llenan de color la ciudad, particularmente de esos colores guinda y magenta que tanto me gustan. 

 

Inspiración para la paleta de colores / Color inspiration

Etapas de la ilustración / Illustration process

 

“In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.” 


― Guillermo del Toro

☽  ☽  ☽  ☽  ☽    We are all monsters   ☽  ☽  ☽  ☽  ☽