New look for my children´s book illustration / Fantasy & Science Fiction art website. Or… how to try to organize 20 years of paintings and going crazy once again.

Well… short post this one. Just to mention that as you might have guessed this website has now a new look. I´ve been trying for ages to organize my illustration content and you´re looking at another miserable attempt at that. If you have an idea and you think you need a children´s book illustrator, or fantasy / scif concept artist then have fun exploring my page.

So if you´re browsing the internet looking to find a children´s book illustrator, trying to understand how to hire a children´s book illustrator or you are wondering how much does it cost to hire a children´s book illustrator take a look at my work and send me an email with details for your project. 😉

Click here to see some of my children´s book illustrations.

Click here to see some of my concept art or fantasy / scifi illustrations

Click here to see an example of one of my recent books “The Masterpiece (One big canvas – Book 1)

Click here to download and read my free Martian Fantasy Comics adventure too.

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http://www.icreateworlds.net

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are searching for how to hire a children´s book illustrator or concept artist take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do togheter.

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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

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CONTACT

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Mix: Very Old Doodles, Sketches, Scribbles, Tests and stuff 1…

Very Old Doodles and Sketches and stuff 1…
Sketches I did back on my army days or earlier back in the late 80s early 90s perhaps…

I found an old folder with some small scans of a few images of mine done more than 25 years ago most of them. I was trying to find the old pics to do a better scan but I don´t have time right now. Nevertheless I wanted to showcase here this stuff as it´s a good depiction of not only my love for fantasy landscapes and for creating fantasy worlds either related to children book material or simply as concept art doodles and color tests.
Some of these images go way back before 1992 of course at the time I was with the army and many of these “epic” landscapes were sketched in small sheets of paper I had around at my HQ back then, some on the back of anything I could find.
Here it goes, sorry about the image sizes but it´s what I could find.

Of course a lot of these was way before digital; ( yes kids, no phones, apps, social media or wifi ); at the time the most advanced computer had been the Sinclair ZX SPECTRUM a few years back and so when I created most of these images I never even could dream that one day I would be sharing them with the world in a sci-fi thing called THE INTERNET.
So here they go. I have a lot more in my physical paper archives but I need to find and scan them. Maybe one of these days I´l start remaking some of these landscapes just for fun.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for a children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work no a pod project even ( I do not descriminate print on demand for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

 

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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

***

CONTACT

 

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “The Adventures of Prince Ziph – PT version : As Aventuras dos Príncipe Ziph” ( 1992 – 22 years old )

“The Adventures of Prince Ziph – PT version : As Aventuras dos Príncipe Ziph” – V2.0

Time once again for more bad art from long ago as people tend to enjoy looking at my early efforts at this stuff.
This particular one was my second atempt to put to paper my initial concept for the adventures of Prince Ziph which later became my “ONCE UPON A TIME ON MARS” fantasy comics which you can download for free here on this website of course.
These early 92 pages are just a sketchbook, ink doodle version which I didn´t took further at the time.
I had just read “THE HOBBIT” for the first time around 1984, way before Tolkien´s name became the mainstream movie connection of today and I wanted to create my own fantasy story without many human or human-like characters in it.
So I came up with these spider-looking fellows as I also wanted to play with peoples fear of spiders and create a good “spider” hero which has his adventures in a fantasy land similar to the one from The Neverending Story ( book and movie ) which is still one of my my inspiration sources. I did the first sketch pages back in 1987.

Later around 2004 when I started to create the current version for this original sketch work from 87, this fantasy land of Ziph became the Planet Mars because I was heavily influenced by the Art Bell paranormal talk radio show and in particular by the Face on Mars and Monuments of Mars controversy under Richard C.Hoagland´s work.
By the way, although I have a similar wacky death grim rieper character in my story that had nothing to do with Terry Pratchet´s Discworld at all. It was 1987 and Portugal never knew anything about Pratchet´s novels at the time because they weren´t available here and remember there was no internet either. Discworld only appeared in Portugal around early 2000s and it never took of at all in sales, if I´m not mistaken only the first book was released here to a very poor reception and so nothing more was published.
The fact the I also have a very dark humor and a death character it´s just one of those coincidences as me and Terry Pratchet seemed to share the same sick sense of humor.

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , board-game illustrator, card game artist, concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work no a pod project even ( I do not descriminate print on demand for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.

***

luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

***

CONTACT

 

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “Battle in the Galaxy – M88 : COMICS” ( 1981 – 11 years old )

Hopefully everyone is still on a big hangover and nobody will notice this post because I will start this new 2018 year featuring some more of my drawings from when I was a kid.
What you see below was another of my old atempt at comics from when I was 11 years old back in 1981.
As you might see it has some “Star Wars” influences in it of course; but not just from that as at the time I was watching all sorts of space operas in theaters like “Starcrash“; “Battle Beyond the Stars“, “The Humanoid“, etc and all these were very much engraved into my imagination forever.
Because there was no internet at the time, the VHS hadn´t even arrived and my only country only had one TV channel so no movies there except at wednesdays when it was “movie night” and we got all the James Cagney gangster movies over and over again.
If a kid like me wanted to have something related to scifi to play with or look at we had to invent our own stories “and movies” and so, trying my best at creating comics was my way of having that space experience and I spent a lot of time doing stuff like this you will see next.

I remember that this atempt of mine at comics here was inspired by a big marvel comic black and white book I had ( and still have here ) which was the comics adaptation of Star Wars and so this is why this story starts with a corridor laser fight scene too as it was the way the second half of that movie adaptation begun with, with Han Solo shooting stormtroopers on the Death Star corridor.
This is actually “a sequel” for another story I did some month before and actually I never got to complete this one. I did the first pages you saw above with the start of the adventure and then I did the last page of that story. I was going to do the middle but then somehow some other kid stuff got in the way I guess.

 

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “ALIEN – COMICS (Novelisation adaptation” ( 1983 – 13 years old )

I was only able to watch Ridley Scott´s “ALIEN” more than ten years after it premiered in theaters. I was too young to be allowed inside the Cinema when the movie was released and so I missed it. Because we´re taking about an Era where even VHS had not appeared yet , either we saw a movie like this when it was being screened or we would never have any other chance. So I missed it.
But I knew of its existence and I remember that this was one of those movies that I really wanted to see when I was a kid but I never got the chance. Even if the poster looked a bit scary.
Before the Internet, “my internet” was called books ! And one day around 1983 I got my hands on the movie novelization written by Alan Dean Foster (who else) and by reading that book, that was the first time I got to learn anything about the movie plot.
Because the book had about six or eight photographs from the movie I decided to make my own comics adaptation of the book.
This is why you look at my comics pages below and you see some things resembling the original sets and scenery and others which I depicted in a complete different way, like “my Nostromo”. The funny thing is that I seemed to have managed to illustrate the computer “mother” room with almost the same exact look it has in the movie and that came out just of my imagination.
So anyway here it is. I never got to finish this, because at 13 I was always looking to create new scifi projects of my own and so these are the only pages I created.

I wonder how I would have depicted the Alien itself ?… We´ll never know now…

 

 

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “DRACKON DAS ESTRELAS – COMICS” ( 1984 – 14 years old )

Just to scare some more potential clients away, here´s one of my old and first tries at creating comics when I was a kid. This was done around 1984 when I was barely 14 years old and it´s “my famous” incomplete scifi-story; this because I never got to finish the album. I did 40 hand drawn pages for about three or four months but there is one I never got to complete the inking process to this day and it has remained like that for 34 years. Maybe one of this days I´ll finish this project.
This was really a compendium of everything that I loved and inspired me when I was 14 in sci-fi. So there´s a character with “Apollo´s” hair from Galactica, there´s a space mercenary because Han Solo was my favorite hero back then, there´s an alien cantina and all sorts of things, the story starts like in Superman the Movie, etc.
This is how my artwork looked like when just turned 14, back in 1984.

One particular detail is that even back then I didn´t wanted to copy the super-hero american comics style and what I always loved was to read real science fiction or stuff that was not connected to super heros. So this comics reflect all that and even have a touch of Space 1999 in them too.
So… enjoy… I guess…

 

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS COMICS” ( 1983 – 13 years old )

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS COMICS” ( 1983 – 13 years old )

Continuing to scare potential clients away, here´s a glimpse at some of my early doodlings from when I was a kid. This time, here´s the only pages I (and a friend of mine) got to do when trying to create a comics adaptation of the movie “BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS” , a Roger Corman Star Wars knock off which was released back in 1980 and which at the time was of major influence in my imagination.
So one summer when I was around 12/13 years old, me and my friend started to create this comics adaptation of the movie; and remember … all this from memory as this was made back in 1983 when something like the Internet wasn´t even dreamed in science fiction. No reference material, nothing, just what we remembered from seeing at the movie theater when we went to see the movie, maybe days, weeks or months before.
And so the result was this. Too bad we didn´t got to complete the entire movie “adaptation”…It would be fun to see the whole thing now.

Even back then because I already hated to draw characters and had no interest in creating human figures, my friend took the job of illustrating the characters and I got to do what I always loved, create the scenery, space scenes and backgrounds.

All these back in the days when we really had to use our imagination as there was nothing around for us to pick from and I only got to see the movie again recently when I got the bluray.

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “O OVNI / UFO” ( 1980-81 / 10 years old )

It seems you are enjoying taking a look at these drawings from when I was a kid, so now I leave you with what was probably my first attempt to create my own comics adventure back in 1980/81 when I was 10 years old.
Continue at your own peril.

This was actually inspired by one of the Portuguese comics scifi series back then; something called “Tonkari” which nowadays looking back at it was real funny because it stole elements from a ton of other different known works at the time. But when you are a kid you don´t notice those things and so I loved the Tonkari series and with my UFO story I tried to create my own similar hero.
I hope you enjoyed this brief example of what type of pics I was doing when I was 10 years old. More drawings and comics from when I was a kid to come in the future.

As the great Criswell used to say in “PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE”: – “Future events such as these, will afect you in the future.”

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let me see what we can do to help your project become a reality.

 

***

luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

***

CONTACT

 

 

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “HOW I LEARNED TO CREATE IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES BY MYSELF BY COPYING ONE OF MY FAVORITE ILLUSTRATORS FROM THE 70S, TIM WHITE” ( 1988 / 18 years old )

Many years ago, back in 1988 when I was still trying to learn how to draw landscapes and scenery, long before the internet my only reference material were the classic book covers of the scifi novels I could get my hands on at the time.
What you see below is my very first attempt to evolve my drawing style. I loved this book cover so much that one day I decided to pick up a pencil and side-by-side try to replicate the original image.

By doing this ( took me 2 days ) I learned a ton of stuff about composition, how to simplify elements and put them together to simulate more details than those which are actually illustrated, learned about shapes, shadows and a lot of other things.
So I guess “Tim White” was “my teacher”.
Of course no computers existed back in 1988 capable of creating digital art and so all you see here was done entirely in traditional pencil and paper.
After that, I got the courage to try and do my very own landscape from imagination without copying from anywhere else. So about a week after the first “Tim White” cloned image I went and did this scenery below. I used color pencils for the first time here; actually understanding what I was trying to achieve.
Unfortunately I no longer have a good scan of this old image.

I liked the end result as it was also the first time I managed to create an epic landscape Fantasy vista.
Then a few months after that I did my “third” scenery.
This one:

With this one I tried to be more ambitious. Initially I only had the dragon on the left side which was drawn on a A4 size sheet. Then I needed more space for its wing on the right and so I added another A4 and continue to illustrate.
Then I saw a documentary about Easter Island on Tv and I inserted my own Easter Island statue into the scenery; then the landscape grew from there.
I started to detail the island on the left; there was no stopping anymore and I ended up completing everything else around.
Because of the two A4 sheets of paper glued together I had the idea of continuing to illustrate the epic scenery and tried to continue with another panel on the left which is the one you see next here:

The pic above is actually the right side of another two A4 panel illustration.
The left side was to be connected with the right side of the other first dragon pic  but I never added color and just painted this one when I noticed it could work as a standalone image.
This was actually inspired by the movie “LEGEND” by Ridley Scott as Cinema is one of my major sources of inspiration since ever. I have the left side here somewhere…
All these were still colored with simple watercolor-color pencils as it was the only thing I was trying to learn to use at the time and could afford to buy.
Although the original dragon landscape before, was painted over a few years of layered work each time I learned a different skill I went back to it and so the colors for that one do not totally resemble the first painting I tried to do when I did the drawing.

Because I was enjoying learning to create these landscapes out of my imagination I used the same techniques to make a serious try at a more developed comics project.
Below you see three panels out of that taken from a 3 page first test I did back then, around 1988/89.

This story never got much further but I enjoyed creating these epic vistas at the time and although the coloring now looks rather bad to my 2017 eyes, back then I had a lot of fun discovering how to use shadow and light just coloring everything with my color pencils over Rotring inked rough sketches.

Another go I did at starting a comics story heavily based on environments was this one next.

That one is also the first real attempt of mine to color an image based on the fantasy story I had inside my mind forever and of which I had already tried to do some earlier pages back in 1987/88. This story later became my current version for “ONCE UPON A TIME ON MARS” which you can download for free and learn more about on this website.
After this test I discover the work of Illustrator Michael Wheelan; bought a book about his artwork and I decided that I also wanted to learn to paint with acrylics and watercolors and so, what you see next is my first ever attempt to use acrylics on a piece heavily inspired by Wheelan´s motifs too.

After this I continued to learn from every book I could get. And from movies in VHS.
I didn´t had the money to go into an art school, and besides those didn´t even existed in Portugal at the time when it comes to Fantasy illustration and so I continued to learn what I could by myself, buying some art books, watching a lot o movies, reading a lot of novels and continue to try to improve my own imaginary worlds.

Then one day, many years later I found myself with enough illustrations in my portfolio that actually were worth anything to show and in 1993 I got hired by a Portuguese company which was creating the first PC Portuguese video game at the time to illustrate for their project and ended up staying with “GAMBYS” the game for about three years illustrating full time for that company and also creating a ton of animations in the earlier DOS version for 3D Studio if you can imagine.

That was my professional start and the end of the first stage of my journey when it comes to learning to create fantasy landscapes by myself.
The traditional illustration phase.

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25 YEARS LATER

25 years later, I´m now at my Digital Phase.
If you are looking for a children book artist or fantasy illustrator, have a scifi project or just want some imaginary landscapes done as concept art, book covers or simply poster artwork let me know. 😉

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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK

If you are a potential illustration client, do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let me see what we can do to help your project become a reality.

***

luisperesillustrator@gmail.com

***

CONTACT

MUSEUM : Drawings from when I was a kid – “INFINITY STARSHIP” ( 1983 / 13 years old )

I created these back in 1983 when I was 13 years old.
Long before the internet, long before video-games, even before VHS or Home-Video, we only had two things to help us make us dream about the stars. Either we went to the movies ( and there weren´t many out there about space exploration done properly ) or we stayed at home, read books, comics or watched “SPACE 1999” on TV when it was on.

To me “SPACE 1999” was the main thing where I kept getting inspiration for my attempts at creating my own artwork and so this drawings you see below not only were my attempt to create something like a starship similar to Moon-Base-Alpha in concept ( mixed with 60s Star Trek ) but what you are looking at are also my first attempts to learn how to use color pencils.

Since I was a kid , I didn´t cared about creating characters and I always wanted to design the imaginary worlds they lived in instead. So at my 13 years of age this was another of my attempts to create something based on scenery and atmosphere. I remember I had a ton of fun dreaming about these corridors and rooms and this little project of mine was also the start for me in trying to learn about perspective.
I had no access to books, art schools or reference material at all these days and so these drawings came only from my imagination ( reading a lot of sci-fi novels at the time also helped ).

I hope you enjoyed this brief example of what type of pics I was doing when I was 13 years old. More drawings and comics from when I was a kid to come in the future.
As the great Criswell used to say in “PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE”: – “Future events such as these, will afect you in the future.”