Musaraña - My first published work!

This is the big project I worked on this summer, a spread for Revista Musaraña. This is a bi-annual publication published in Costa Rica. It combines art and literature,  assigning writers and artists in pairs in order to produce a collaboration based solely on their own inspiration.

 (cover design ©Mariela Montoya 2010)

I had the pleasure of illustrating my friend Sofia Gonzalez's story. We played with the idea of the ways in which we imagine the world works when we're children. In this case, our protagonist believes electricity is produced by an underground army of hamsters, until he reaches adulthood and starts going a little bit nuts.

Sofia and I favoured the idea of a triptych, for both the text and the illustration.

This was my process:

Comp:

 Sofia: ... is that a hamster hugging a mattress wearing a diaper?

Tati: ... yes. And that is the one and only time you will ever ask that question in your life.

Graphite:

  After three years of playing around with every imaginable medium, I'm starting to settle down with this graphite/colour pencil and acrylic/gouache/ink technique. First you set the values down with graphite and then add the colour in with any of the aforementioned mediums. I prefer gouache because of the lift-off but in this case I used acrylic and ink since it's what I had available in CR. This picture only shows the two ends because the middle was... let's say freestyle (because it's not improvised if I had already planned what was gonna go there, yes?)

Colour:

This was a quick picture I took. I wasn't quite done by this point, but all I did after that was make the colours MUCH more vivid.

Final:

(Click to view larger.)

Printed:

All images ©Tatiana Dengo 2010 unless otherwise stated.
Story text seen in the pictures ©Sofia Gonzalez 2010.