Welcome to the rec room!

From now on you’ll see a lot of big pixels covering the screen as you scroll through the pages.

As an illustrator and animator, I really love the pixel art medium because it allows me to experiment and get fast results than other illustration or animation methods. There’s less room for explicit details, but at the same time, the tools drawer opens for us to toy with how we read information, similar to working on a pointillism painting or a mosaic.

It also has heavy links to personal computers, videogames and modern culture, so it catches the eye of many young people and those who grew up surrounded by these technologies.

Since I believe it can also have editorial interest, in this page I also explore with the idea of mixing illustration with pixel art.

▲ ▲ Different fanart projects from 2019 and 2020. The two projects above had the main goal of drawing as many characters as possible, (50 each) both from games I had played recently and from the hit manga Beastars. They were really helpful in letting me polish my technique with many different character proportions, while trying to convey the variety of moods of the games and characters through posing, colouring and detailing.

The project on the bottom right was part of a Reanimation collab themed around the Bojack Horseman episode “Fish Out of Water”. Given that the characters had just escaped from a factory about to explode, I created a background reminiscent of the iconic crumbling castle scenes from Castlevania. Figuring out the colour palette and animating the different effects was a great practice. (You can find as well the character-less backgrounds for this project on my Artstation)

▲ Various sprite-commission works and art gifts done from 2017 to 2020, mostly meant for use as avatars on mail accounts, chats and social media. Other clients also asked for more elaborated scenes with several characters seen interacting, or used their art order for a greetings card. Like with my personal projects, these are a great way for me to keep honing my skills, as taking care of what the clients want always leads me to new territories.

Still frame from another of my introspective pieces, except using pixel art as the medium. I made this piece as part of the final project of my fine arts degree, and with it I wanted to explore how our mind works in creating links with different people and ideas. I reimagined the mind as a machinery kept in place by mice, where clog are ideas or part of ourselves that need to be moving in order to stay in our recent memories and interests.

▲ Inspired by games like Story of Seasons and Stardew Valley, I made these mockups and assets for a possible farming game. The characters are colorful and have big heads in order to allow for expressions and to stand out from the envirtoments. I intend to keep drawing more areas in the future, like a barn.

▲ LATKA▲ I have been working as an animator for Dim Widdy’s passion project about a lazy pink golden mole. With over 30 different animations so far, this little rodent can do a lot of things already, like swim, climb walls and ceilings, slide, go up ladders, dig in many directions or adjust his glasses after getting up from a really long fall.

▲ ROPASCI FOREST

Entry for itchio’s Mix & Game Jam 2020. The goal was to create a game within 48 hours, mixing different genres. We went for a Forest Escape type of game with Rock, Paper & Scissors battles, with assets for the player, the hands, the UI, 4 enemies and the overworld. I drew each player finger position individually, so this allowed for over 1000 finger combinations with just one hand. The art ended up ranking 27th out of the 668 entries.

Mockup battle animation & assets for a pocket game, using characters from Sega’s Puyo Puyo series. The goal was to get a fluid animation by using inbetweens with subtle flow details and piece movements.

In addition to these and other projects, in 2020 I also worked with Ukuza Games as a sprite animator on a demo pitch for Konami, featuring known characters from one of their IPs in Hi-Bit Pixelart.