Portraits of people important to me, created using pencils, sanguines, gouaches and cigarette ashes.

Valentina is a model I've been working with for the past few months, who has a wonderful habit of playing with her hands near her face whenever she strikes a pose. These are some of the results from her sitting sessions.

In October 2005 a good friend of mine took me on a trip to a ghost town in the Mexican Bajio called Mineral de Pozos. We went to take some pictures and found a dry riverbed. I'd taken the precaution of bringing with me some brushes and a lot of red pigment. When I sprinkled the pigment on a puddle, the minerals in the water reacted to the pigment and bubbled up in the most beautiful red and gold patterns. We must have taken about five hundred snapshots in the river that day. Later on I reworked some of them in Photoshop, mixing them with some brushwork done with black india ink and gouaches. These are the results.

Single illustration created using several pencil drawings digitaly composited into a unified image. It was a fun way to try out different possible composition arrangements that I keep meaning to try out again but haven't yet repeated.