Ale Mercado Website » Work Process

Image in the Background

Alé Mercado — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:21:27 +0000

I’ve been asked a few times about the picture in the background in www.alemercado.com

I did a large drawing that you can only see fully if you have a 21″ screen or larger. It’s not that good anyway, so you are not missing much.

I called it “The Evil Powers of Illustration.”

Novartis Live Illustration

Alé Mercado — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:07:11 +0000

I was called by OMT Group to help them in an event they were doing within the Annual Conference NOVARTIS was having in Wicklow.

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.

Drafts from Barnstorm Play

Alé Mercado — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:12:00 +0000

I thought it might be interesting to show some of the drafts I developed for the illustration for the New Barnstorm production.
Once I had the structure clear in my head (and the customer gave me the go-ahead) I redrew everything from scratch in Photoshop and Painter

Here you have them.

Famous Rejects

Alé Mercado — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:56:00 +0000

I am clearing my hard drive from jobs done last year. I’ve come across this poster that never made it. It was very influenced by Saturio Alonso’s Olmo pieces.

I also got to see the three attempts to get to the final image for this film festival… It was quite difficult to get the mood they were looking for. I never have to rework completely an image and in this case, I had to do it THREE times! Funny enough, they were happy with the last option but I had to change the foreground girl to a boy (I am normally asked the opposite)

Looking back on it (and to the very final images they used) you can see how the customer was right to push in a different direction. The final images are much stronger in both cases… There must be a lesson to be learned somewhere, I think.

You can find the final image of the Fresh Film Festival in this same blog (24th October 2007)