LAURA REPLINGER Illustration Portfolio
TABLE OF CONTENTS 01 02
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ABOUT
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ILLUSTRATION PROJECTS
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS
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OTHER WORKS
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DIGITAL WORK
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TRADITIONAL ARTWORK
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ANDREIDAS
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NEW DRAWING PROJECTS
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INDEX OF PICTURES
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CONTACT
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LAURA REPLINGER Professional illustrator
ABOUT ME Laura Replinger studied Fine Arts at the University of Murcia and Rome. Over the years, she specialized in drawing and digital painting.
SPECIALIZATIONS Editorial illustration and concept art
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GORGO IN THE DARK "I have forgotten my life, the people I knew, the people I loved; her faces dissolve into an abstract vapor and my name is a meaningless phoneme. Only imprecise flashes of memory reach me, as if they were rowing towards me from a previous reincarnation. The first millennia I remembered everything or the vast majority. Then many memories were veiled, detaching from me like the scales of a shed of skin."
LAURA REPLINGER FUENTES
2023
Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma 2023
In this editorial project with text and illustratios of my authorship, I tell the story of a woman who, after being thrown into the sea by her crew, is adopted into a swarm of jellyfish. Along with them, she will mutate and survive throughout the ages, bestializing her body and her mind in the underwater abysses, and progressively drowning the remains of her humanity. This illustrated project materialized in a book made entirely with acetates. Acetate was used because it is a ghostly and watery material. Acetate is transparent, but several together is blinding, like when someone dives into the sea. Acetate is the idea of being under the sea, and it is also the idea of oblivion, of not remembering oneself as a human, of not remembering what made you human. It is also the stagnation of morality. It represents the confused mind of the protagonist, where oblivion and memory are mixed. The thought of her is becoming like that of the body of water, and like her lack of vision. She remembers very little of who she was and what the world was like.
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"A pang of something I refuse to recognize as remorse sinks into my flesh. I know that it is no longer pertinent to ask myself why I did what I did and, despite this, reflecting becomes inescapable... I am and was a mind aware of horror, aware of goodness and evil, just like those who once threw me to certain death. Since then, the world and loneliness stagnated my memories, but never that consciousness. What's more, they strengthened more than ever the ability to protect the motivation of my actions under reasonable pretexts until, finally, any justification was unnecessary and any initiative was automatically endorsed." GORGO IN THE DARK, LAURA REPLINGER FUENTES
2023
"I would rather have devoured you like a mythological being than stay here tormenting myself with the conviction that perhaps you are in that forest of the violent against themselves that Dante spoke of, vegetating and dying next to Virginia Woolf while you wonder why you did it..." LAURA REPLINGER
2022
LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS
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Los violentos contra sí mismos (The violent against themselves) is the story of a man who writes a letter to his beloved, who has committed suicide. He imagines that she has been reborn as a tree in the second ring of the seventh circle of Dante's Inferno. He believes that she suffers there, and decides that he will kill himself too in order to accompany her. His letter is not a farewell, but a greeting. The story and the illustrations (both my authorship), were part of an illustrated project in which allegorical images, such as the chandelier that symbolizes the two lovers in life, or the trees that symbolize the couple after death , were unfolding to show the different aspects of the story. The final image is a drop-down that shows an image of God (father, son and holy spirit). The only head that does not look forward is the head of Jesus Christ, since it is the only one that is human. The folding and unfolding movements of the image create a dynamic that symbolizes God's indecision: he does not know whether to punish the lovers and keep them separated, or allow their spirits to be together.
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25 Preparatory sketches that, in the end, didn´t be part of the book . In these sketches I was still exploring how to represent that forest of Dantes´ Inferno full of suicide people; and how to represent the meeting between the two lovers (if the gods allow them to be together), transformed into trees like Daphne.
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DIGITAL WORK THE WONDERS OF CREATIVE SOFTWARE 019
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DIGITAL WONDERLAND Most of my notable work has been done through the use of digital software. Digital painting is an important part of my creative projects. Since I started my specialization in artistic computer programs like Photoshop, I have never felt disappointed by the possibilities they offer. Nevertheless, I have had to deal with them like wild horses that needed to be tamed. The struggle to make the software work according to my demands has been hard, but well rewarded with illustrations that make me feel proud – although there is still too much to learn.
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UNCANNY ATMOSPHERES One of my favourite literary works is Les Jardins statuaires (1982) by Jacques Abeille. The novel tells us about the arrival of a traveller into a mysterious and decaying country, where some farmers cultivate statues that grow like trees. The uncontrolled growth of some has caused them to engulf entire villages. The novel is filled with a terrifying, monumental, and invasive neoclassicist aesthetic. However, that world is falling apart, leaving a void as colossal as that of the maddened statues.
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DISTURBING ARCHITECTURES
NATALIA SMIRNOVA, PIRANESI, GÉRARD TRIGNAC, BEKSINSKI
In my works I try to awaken the feelings of brutality, nostalgia and mystery of this novel by Abeille. Natalia Smirnova, Piranesi, Trignac and Beksinski, as well as symbolists such as Gustave Moreau, are authors whose visual work encloses tragic, uncanny, beautiful and desolate universes, but with a light of hope.
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THE SINISTER EXPERIENCE IN HIS BOOK "A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL" (1756), EDMUND BURKE SAYS THAT LIGHT AT ITS HIGHEST POWER IS ANOTHER FORM OF DARKNESS.
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HORROR AND BEAUTY In many of my illustrations I try to let the horror filter through the beauty (of light). I like beauty to mask dark stories; I like that, she herself, to be a form of horror. Beauty is only pleasant; horror is only unpleasant. But the marriage of the beautiful and the terrifying is an interesting contradiction.
S P I D E R
S T A T U E
WHITE NIGHTMARES K I S S I N G
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B O Y
draw, passion& anatomy THE CURE OF ACADEMIC METHODOLOGY
TRADITIONAL ARTWORK
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ANDREIDAS The following drawings are part of the series of nineteen drawings entitled Andreidas. Some of them were finalists in the annual Creamurcia contest in Murcia 2017. For them I took my inspiration from the nineteenthcentury novel The Future Eve (L'Ève Future, 1886) by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
L'ÈVE FUTURE
"La Naturaleza cambia, pero no la Andreida" VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM.
1886
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NEW DRAWING PROJECTS THE NEW FORMS OF THE HUMAN
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INDEX OF PICTURES 00 1
GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_Cover Front
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Environment 1 Concept art illustration for the Lightbox Expo: Box of Mystery challenge sponsored by Artstation.
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_Cover Back
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_Book Acetate version
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ARTEMIS 01
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_illustration 01
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Environment Statue City_01
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_illustration 02
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Spider statue kissing a boy
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_illustration 03 0 23
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_illustration 04
Andreida 19 graphite pencil and acrylic 29,7×42 cm
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GORGO EN LA OSCURIDAD_illustration 05 0 24
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_03
Andreida 03 graphite pencil and acrylic 29,7×42 cm
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_ Book
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Andreida 04 graphite pencil and acrylic 29,7×42 cm
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Andreida 13 graphite pencil and acrylic 29,7×42 cm
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Andreida 17 graphite pencil and acrylic 29,7×42 cm
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Simone hates the Collector graphite pencil, pastel and marker 21 x 29,7 cm
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Simone loves the Collector graphite pencil, pastel and marker 21 x 29,7 cm
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_ illustration 05 Sketch
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_05
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_04
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_ Cover Outside
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LOS VIOLENTOS CONTRA SÍ MISMOS_ Cover Inside
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LOS VIOLENTOS_Sketches
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LOS VIOLENTOS_Sketches
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LOS VIOLENTOS_Sketches
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GET IN TOUCH WITH ME EMAIL laurareplinger.art@gmail.com
MOBILE +34 600 86 25 97
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DECLARATION OF AUTHENTICITY OF THE MATERIAL
The undersigned, Laura Replinger Fuentes, declares under its own responsibility to be the author of the material contained in this portfolio.