Pictoplasma Magazine Response: Artist - Wilmer Murillo

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Following my explorations into the artist Wilmer Murillo from my review of the 'Pictoplasma: Character Portraits’ book I decided I wanted to explore the creation of my own symmetrical character mask formed by inspiration from Native American tribal masks, as used by Murillo in his designs.

I love how each of these designs shown in their Pictoplasma submissions have a face when the character is face both up and down. Through the use of symmetry and inspiration from Native American masks they have been able to create two characters in one and I found this extremely interesting and wanted to explore this myself.

Although the colours used by Murillo are rather muted, I wanted to go with a psychedelic approach for my design as I felt I could create some interesting visuals from this. Originally I created the line work in black and converted it to white before adding the black background underneath as I wanted it to be clear against the vibrancy of the rest of the design.

I created my background by developing a gradient of various colours and using the ‘liquify’ tool. Once I was happy with the placement of the pattern I duplicated the layer, inverting and altering it where necessary so it could be used as the colour for the line work as well. I felt this really helped tie the whole illustration together nicely and created a really interesting effect.

Unlike Murillo’s illustrations which didn’t include a background, I wanted to identify a way to help my character stand out even further against the background to ensure the colours didn’t merge too much and make my illustration appear flat. Due to this I chose to duplicated my black fill and add a Gaussian blur effect to create this slightly bevelled appearance. I really like the way this helped give depth and dimension to my illustration whilst ensuring all of the elements remained clearly visible.

I attempted to base my design off a combination of animals considering Murillo’s designs which this rule as well. From view 1 the character is a combination of an owl and rooster, whereas from view 2 the character is transformed into a combination of cow and dog. I’m really impressed I managed to achieve this although I definitely feel it is clear this was my first attempt using this technique as a lot of elements could be better defined to help the viewer grasp this immediately like it does in the work created by Murillo, this will give me something to continue practicing though so I am glad I created this experiment as I thoroughly enjoyed the process and would be keen to explore this concept further in the future when developing illustrations and characters.

View 1:

View 2:

 

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