Piece for Laundry Show. South Studios, Dublin

70 of Ireland’s top illustrators, designers and photographers air their dirty laundry in public. Expect secret vices, misdeeds and shamefaced confessions galore. One night only. Brought to you by the Illustrators Guild of Ireland, Offset and Heineken.

This is the piece I’ve done for it. Acrylics on canvas and a bit of cutting and sewing!!

Hope you can make it to the show. It promises to be fantastic!

These are other two examples of what I am lately doing with gouache: very limited palettes and flat colours. Hope you like it

Fucking Pirate, originally uploaded by Alé Mercado.

Here is a bit of a selection for you. Hope you like it.

This is the final piece beautifully framed. Hope you like it.

Click on the image to see a larger version of it.

The idea was to visually condense all the ideas people attending the conference would come up with in a creativity exercise which was coordinated by Paula Clarke. It consisted in representing as visually as possible their vision for the future.

The exercise started at 2 in the afternoon. 20 minutes later I did a round to see what kind of themes people were coming up with.

So around 2:20 I go to a room where I had set up and work on ideas. Once I had something I could work with, I did a bit of photographic research and started drawing faintly on the board with charcoal. It’s 3:15 now.

After that, it is a mad run to fill areas with colour as fast as I can. At this stage I only have another hour.

Filling up areas with acrylics and trying to give some sense of space and volume prove to be a hard task. I just keep going thinking that I don’t have much time left.

At 4:20 the illustration is finished. All the paints and inks are still dripping and I have to dry them with a tissue while we take the piece ro the hall where it is going to be unveil.

This is the final piece as it was presented to NOVARTIS.

It was a really interesting exercise for me and one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever done.

I am quite happy with the concept but I hope I’ll be able to have more time to finish the piece next time.

Hope you like it. Let me know your thoughts too.

Portrait for Kila’s third birthday.
It is done in acrylics on canvas. I get really nervous when I have to use real brushes! (no undo function, you see?)

Last Thursday 31st July I attended the opening of three exhibitions in the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast: AES+F’s Last Riot, The Association of Illustrators’s Images 31 and IGI’s Slant where I took part (see previous post in June.)
The gallery has a few amazing spaces and the works displayed were amazing.
Worth seeing if you are around.

Hope you enjoy it

Candy Karaoke opened yesterday in the Munster Truck Gallery in Francis Street, Dublin. It is an amazing exhibition. 70 creatives reinterpreting their favourite record covers. Some fantastic concepts.
It’s going to be up for two weeks so I really recommend you try and see it.

Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/candyculture/ for some photos of the opening night.