I think the way I found Carmen was through her blog. I saved it to my blogroll and checked back pretty often. She is always posting her latest work and although my Spanish isn’t good enough to read what she writes, it’s always a pleasure to see her inspiring illustrations. After Carmen sent these sketches I wanted to know more about them. In her own words–
“The animal sketches is a series inspired in a ‘70 book I bought in Tallin (Estonia) and maybe they would end in a series of paintings for an exhibition for a Gallery in Madrid next March. I’ll take some pictures of this book, I think you will love it. I just went to Estonia to visit a friend, one day I found a 2nd hand book store, and it was full but really full of treasures, above all in youth fiction printing (most of them printed in Leipzig, which is one of the eastern european cities with more printing history, they really did excellent works. Particularly, I fell in love with this book about animal fables because the black and white original illustrations were painted above with color markers with an exquisite taste by his child owner.
The other sketches are (as you may have noticed) single drawings I do, when inspiration is in the air. Maybe it is interesting to know that (beside the classical moleskines) I use as sketchbooks different kinds of white books that I buy in a printing shop, they are basically sold to be binded, because they are just the sewed pages with no covers.”
Carmen’s sketches have a lot energy. I love seeing the remnants of erased lines where she has revised. Thanks so much Carmen for sharing all of these! I am going to try and get my hands on some of the other books Carmen has illustrated. If you missed yesterday’s post of her book The China Doll, check it out and more of her work finished work here and here.
