I could count in my fingers the times these passages happened to me, and I’d still have some fingers left for future experiences.

One of the greatest was the birth of my son.

Professionally, and personally too for the most part, a very important one happened at the Illustration Academy.

Some others happened inwards, in a more psychological and spiritual sense, as the one I had in the city of Itú in a rite of passage called Leader Training, and in this same place, two years later I had another experience walking across 20 feet of live burning ashes, after 10 hours of preparation. It was like an encounter with my tribal self, experimenting a personal, inner journey like no other.

When I saw Zeitgeist - The movie e Zeitgeist - Addendum, something clicked on my mind, like a deeper understanding about society, religion, politics and economy. Knowledge acquired about the external world, human nature in a collective, social aspect.

One of those experiences, on the brink of altered states of consciousness, just happened this week while organizing my discs here in my studio, after finding a gift from a dear friend, Christiano Parentoni: the double DVD “One Giant Leap / What About Me?”.

I inserted the DVD on the computer, totally unaware of another journey that was about to begin.

I was not ready for such a deep experience, hidden within a mere DVD. I froze in front of the monitor, from start to end, living one of those rare moments of deep insights and inner transformations.

I watched it again two days later, and once again I was overwhelmed by the emotion and depth of this amazing documentary that gathers musicians, philosophers, psychologists, tribal leaders, religious leaders, rockstars, all in all some very wise thinking minds (and others not so wise, to enhance the contrasts), filmed in dozens of different countries.

The result is a solid yet light content, wrapped up in an aesthetic beauty that floods your eyes.

It would be too pretentious from me if I’d try to translate all that I’ve seen in this DVD in a single post, so all I can do is to embed some of the videos available on this documentary website, and suggest you to buy the DVDs with the complete works, because that’s something to see over and over again, every now and then.

Chris, I may stay in your debt for quite some years, until I find a proportional quality gift to give back to you.

A warm and heart filled Thank You, my friend.

Attending the summer courses on location is a real life changing experience, a big project.

Since the creation of VLP - Visual Literacy Program - last semester, The Illustration Academy is entering a new phase, bringing unprecedented online art teaching methods. The website is the virtual Illustration Academy, with a close follow-up from Faculty instructors on the Forums, blog and videos.

What was great just got incredible, and they joined forces with the acclaimed Massive Black team and now we can enjoy the best of both worlds, all at the same place.

After bringing some of the best video trainings from Massive Black into the VLP program, that was already powered by dozens of The Illustration Academy instructors videos, both schools created Discovery, an in depth, 5 week online program, that is the closest experience to the Academy and Massive Black training courses, without leaving home.

The cost is significantly reduced, ranging from U$ 200.00 to U$ 500.00, and I just can’t stress enough how important this opportunity can be for those who are seriously commited to improving their art and commercial skills.

Just consider having Mike Bierek, John English, Whit Brachna, Mark English, Sam Brown, Jon Foster, Wesley Burt, Sterling Hundley, Jason Chan, Gary Kelley, El Coro, Anita Kunz, Rich Doble, CF Payne, Carl Dobsky, George Pratt, Jason Manley, Kemp Remillard, Brent Watkinson, Natalie Ascencios, Terry Brown, Doug Chayka, Francis Livingston, Robert Meganck, Barron Storey and Andrea Wicklund, right on your screen - full screen at high res using the Elluminate interface, by the way - with no traveling and housing cost, it’s a bargain.

Then some folks let this opportunity window pass by, and then torture themselves tinking: “why didn’t I do it… it wasn’t that expensive at all…”.

Well, it all starts next monday, February 1st, and goes thru March 05th, 5 days a week.

My opinion about it? It’s worth every cent and every minute of it.

Now if you are considering a long term investment, with multiple benefits, spending U$ 45.00 a month for a 12 month acess, there’s nothing like VLP - Visual Literacy Program.

There’s no DVD, online training, forum or group to match this program’s content.

Mostly the same names listed above, in unbelievably dense and insightful videos, ranging from 20 minutes to over 5 hours, and having the instructors and students interacting intensely on the Forums, orienting, answering questions, debating art related subjects, deep and wide by every means.

There’s no way to describe how valuable this can be for any illustrator’s carreer, novice or veteran.

No question goes unanswered, no subject goes without a feedback, all small-talk-free, spam-free, bull-free.

Can it get any better? This is just the start, who knows where and how this is going to be in the near future?

I trust the guys behind all this. I trust the students who attend these programs.

Is it worth? Think it over, you know the answer.

I see you online, on Discovery and at the VLP.

Let’s face the facts, we’re addicted to it. Even in those moments that there’s no job on the way, we have some fun drawing or drooling over illustrations of those we admire.

Revista Ilustrar is one more reason for us to dive into the healthy addiction of illustration, right in the first day of the year.

Right in the first hours of 2010, the 14th edition of Revista Ilustrar is available for free download.

You will se the graphic works of Visca, the astounding pieces of Fernando Vicente, the beautiful watercolors of Marcelo Daldoce, the artwork for money bills and stamps by Czeslaw Slania, a digital step-by-step by Weberson Santiago, the fine cut paper images by Carlos Meira, the insightful text by Brad Holland, and Renato Alarcão surgically opening the guts of the cultural pseudo-contests.

Each one bringing up his talent, in quantity and quality.

Lots of paper, paint and stained fingers, back to the roots, and working digitally only when it was absolutely needed.

I enjoyed the results, sketchbooks got fatter, but it all happened at a cost. My 3D skills rusted big time, after a whole year away from nodes and vectors.

Back to the 3D scenario, 2010 will be mostly digital, and the images posted here will be made in Photoshop, Painter, Modo, ZBrush and Maya.

I’ll post these works here and in Sketcheria’s Flickr, some of them step-by-step, as I did in the canvases I painted in november and december.

The modeling below will be a part of my demo-reel as a concept design piece, an Obama caricature, that will be seen along with Lewis Hamilton and Tiger Woods. It’s a personal project, using a pre-production pipeline I’m used to doing to TV and video producers, adding to what I’ve been studying in 3D in these last few years.

Concept, model sheet, modeling, texturing, animation and render will be lined up and explored, and I’ll make the whole process alone, not as it usually happens in video producers.

All this work, however, won’t last more than 1.5 seconds in the demo reel, as another piece I’m modeling, an helicopter, that started as an animation study in Maya, and will follow a pipeline like this one, from scratch to final edition and compositing in After Effects.

But that’s what animation is all about, lots of studying, lots of working hours, to show a few seconds in a final presentation.

When I twitted about these images in the ZBrush Central forum, the designer Fábio Sasso, A.K.A. Abduzeedo - that runs an excelent design blog that goes by the same name - asked me to do a post about Obama’s modeling, as a making of.

All the steps, from thumbnails to concepts, to model sheets to multi-pass renderings in ZBrush and Photoshop can be followed (in English) clicking the image below.

There are 4 other projects on the way, all the characters are planned, there’s a final script and I have a couple of musicians in my plans to make the soundtrack, and one day they will be on the screens, I mean, monitors.

Actually I want them to be on the big screen, in Anima Mundi and other animation festivals around the world.

There’s no point in dreaming of small things.

R.I.P. Bernie Fuchs.

People from all over the world will go out on the streets next saturday, september 19th and draw, just for fun. Isn’t that cool?

This time the gap between one meeting and the next was just two months, and the one deciding on these dates is the creator of the event, the great illustrator Enrico Casarosa, so I’m not the one to raise a question on that matter.

In São Paulo the forecast is for a sunny to cloudy day, and rain, if it comes, will be at night. Good news, if compaired to the weather we had in our close to underwater Sketchcrawl in São Paulo.

Click on the image below for an updated local forecast (portuguese only).

In a fair weather, or even with a light rainshower - garoa, as we call it - we will meet at Jardim Botânico.

If it does rain cats and dogs again, the best place to go will be SESC Pompéia, an indoor cultural center, that will keep us and our sketchbooks dry during the event.

Jardim Botânico is a large park, but not too crowded, so it will be easy to spot a group of people with their sketchbooks.

It closes at 5:00 PM, making it easier to go back home before dawn.

The Zoo address at googlemaps, from São Judas subway station: http://is.gd/3nOrl ou from Saúde http://is.gd/3nOBF . The bus line departing from Jabaquara subway station is a bit more expensive, because it includes the Zoo ticket.

(Plan A - on fair weather)
Jardim Botânico de São Paulo
Avenida Miguel Stéfano, 3.031 - Água Funda - Zona Sul - São Paulo
Tel: (11) 5073-6300
www.ibot.sp.gov.br
Horário: De terça a domingo e feriados, das 9h às 17h
Preço: R$ 3. Estudantes pagam R$ 1 e crianças de até dez anos, adultos acima de 65 anos e portadores de necessidades especiais são isentos.

(Plan B - under eventual heavy rain)
SESC Pompéia
rua Clélia, 93
Pompéia
São Paulo - SP
cep 05042-000
http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/busca/index.cfm?UnidadesDirector=58
telefone: 11 3871-7700

Here at the Sketcheria there’s a post with all the links for the event, including the newspaper interviews in which Sketchcrawl Brasil was on the headlines, with a full page in color.

Sketchcrawl is just a fun, free and entertaining flash mob, with no fixed rules, and you don’t even need to be a skilled draughtsman to join the crowd. All you need is to like drawing, simple as that. Take your sketchbook, your pencils, pens and color sets along, and let’s spend a few hours drawing outdoors, just for the sake of it, just for fun.

More than 50 folks having fun and drawing at the tables, sketchbooks all over the place, check out the pictures at my Flickr.

I put into practice an idea I had at the Academy back in 1998, which was collecting autographs from my heroes in a baseball. I only had the chance to buy the ball in the last week, and I got Mark English, John English, George Pratt, Brent Watkinson, Doug Chayka, Sterling Hundley and Natalie Ascencios sign it.

Other giants that I missed in this little trophy were Gary Kelley, Chris Payne, Robert Meganck, Jon Foster, Barron Storey, Ted Kinsella, Robin Eley, Andrea Wicklund, Francis Livingstson and Anita Kunz. I’ll have to wait for another chance.

I jumped into the projects on the last two weeks, and in this image I approached a different way to finish the piece as I’d normally do, to get what the IA offers as the most important and interesting thing: to get out of your comfort zone and do something beyond that discovering new paths, techniques and solutions.

I’ve broken the geometry, perspective and the shapes a bit, and during the rendering of the final image, Mark English gave me straight and simple orientations: “flatten your shapes, and reduce tone variation to a minimum. Avoid over-rendering, less is more, right?”. The outcome was indeed much better than what I’d have done in my regular rendering, and I will take home a new way of thinking visually, and I can see many new possibilities on my future pieces.

After all, this is the real spirit of the IA: Transformation. It is indeed an incredible experience, and new insights happened on my third time around.

On returning the concepts are interpreted with new layers of meaning, triggering new synapses, new ways of seeing and making images, it’s kinda hard to explain, but that’s the way things go to every returning student.

Today was a more introspective day, it’s time to think things over, to absorb and internalize this immense amount of information.

By the end of the day there were only three student at the campus dorms - Sarah, from Kuwait and Leah from Canada, and me - and we had the rare and rewarding opportunity to have dinner and go to the movies with George Pratt to see “Hangover”, a great comedy. We did have a lot of fun.

Tomorrow will be my day to get into the plane and go back home, with the words from the “Academy Guy”, a.k.a. Brent Watkinson, in my mind: “Go out in the real world, and do something worthwhile”.

She is a compulsive image maker, drawing since she was a kid on papers spread around the house by her mother, trying to save the walls from being promoted to “artistic support” by little Andrea.

She is former student of the Academy, which she attended 5 and 6 years ago (a curious fact: most of the illustrators have returned for a second year at the Academy, in consecutive years, but that’s a theme for another post), and her passion is creating Art with paints and paper. Digital production is a reality she is becoming used to, not for a long time, and she broke the paradigm of technical excellence or the necessity of merely mastering a software, down to pieces during her demo.

She knew exactly where she wanted to get with the image, and trust me, she rocks.

This photo, taken from the dark projection room, does not match the beauty of the original image she was making on her laptop, but the concept is clear:

ART is undead.

By the way, this is a current subject here at the Academy: Is illustration dead? is it dying? will it die any time soon?

Mark English said that this type of comment started the 60’s, and is still around to this day.

For the last 15 years, the Illustration Academy has been a living and breathing institution, gathering hundreds of students and dozens from around the world and of the most accomplished artists in America. During the 7 week program, students benefit from the expertise of these Masters, and have intense activities, in the studio and attending lectures and demos 7 days a week, anywhere between 12 to 18 hours a day, generally speaking, and depending on personal dedication by the students, of course.

Many of these students, such as Andrea Wicklund herself, Robin Eley, Edward Kinsella, Doug Chayka, John Hendrix, Jim Burke, Ernesto Nemesio, Kevin Chen, Jamie Morris, Scott Henderson, Alexander Klingspor, among many others, succeeded national and internationally, and one of them, Sterling Hundley, is one of the most solicited and renowned illustrators of America these days.

He has become a legend himself, to artists young and old, and in his 30’s has already received 3 prizes from the Society of Illustrators. He is quickly paving his way to the Hall of Fame, and his name is already part of the History of illustration.

Not bad for a business who is said to be on its death bed long before I was born, and look, I am in my early 40’s.

Lady Illustration, believe it or not, looks very healthy, strong and beautiful, at least from my point of view.

A very hot old lady, I dare to say.

This respectable madam is still bringing joy to our lives everyday, and hopefully will keep serving the bread on our tables for many years yet to come.

Saturday, July the 11th, people from all over the world go out to the streets and draw, alone or in groups, on the event created by Enrico Casarosa, a storyboard artist from Pixar.

There are no rules, no subscription, no previous experience required, nothing to worry about.

Only the sketchbook in one hand, pencil on the other, and drawing for the sake of fun, not to make pretty images.

In São Paulo people are gathering downtown at 10:00 AM, in the corner of Rua Augusta and Rua Avanhandava, and they are most likely to break the world record for the third time in a row.

There’s a GoogleMaps here, so if somebody gets late he can find the group wherever they are.

Here in Sarasota I’m not really sure if there will be a group, but I’ll go anyway, and drawing alone will not be a problem.

I’ll post the images here, at Flickr and at the International Forum on Sunday.