P O R T F O L I O D A N I E L
A B R E U
I L L U S T R AT I O N S
T H E
O N E
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After reading somewere on reddit a question about what would happen if one of the ents took over the one ring in the Lord of the Rings universe, the first think that came to my mind was a quote from the second movie said by treebeard, “They come with fire, they come with axes... gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning. Destroyers and usurpers, curse them.” , the idea of an opressed
people that has a powerfull member amongst them isn’t new, however JU is as powerfull as ever, so this idea keept growing in the back of my head. Untill one day I decided to work on it. It started as a 50% gray canvas on photoshop, then, using a simple round brush I kept putting layer apon layer of gray tones until it was ready for texture, normaly I’ll use free wikimedia sources if I don´t have a sutable
picture of my own, wich was the case in this one. Finally came the color, different tecniques were used, but the main one was using various selective color layers and using a mask, aplying that change to the desiered areas only. The total amount of work time for this piece was around ten hours.
T H E
C L A W
“... for so many crowded forward to kill me that they obstructed one another... there was a flash of light, and I (moved by what instinct or inspiration I do not know) snatched at it. I held the Claw.” - Shadow and Claw - Gene Wolfe This is a passage from the book Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe, when Severian holds a
gem (the Claw) and light pours out of it. There isn’t much more to say about the inspiration for this particular piece, it’s a highly suspensefull part of the book that won’t leave your head. Reagarding the techniques used, simples brush strockes in order to define the majority of ellements then aplyed a stretched texture
of a pile of rocks in order to better deffine the diferent ellements like the pilar and the light source, color comes in the end as it usually does in my drawings. To finish up I spread some dust particles to give a realJTUJD tone.
T R E E
O F
L I F E
A simple brush test was how it started, but as soon as I made the little tree and the person besides it and started to see the possibility of the brush strokes I had to keep painting. This was one of the quickest works I’ve done, occupying just a little over three hours. And was a truly great practice in colour and lighting, I chose the pink tones because the Japanese sakura trees are one of my favourite plants.
S H A I
H U L U D
To be completely honest I was trying to make some dunes/desert tests with some brushes, but in the end I wasn’t happy with just a desert so it evolved into a dune piece, being my favourite book series is only fair to make a tribute from time to time. For this one, I didn’t wanted to star with black and white so I chose a random brown along
with a random desaturated orange, and started making shapes and tranforming them, bare in mind that it was all done in photoshop, after a few minutes of this I had the dunes, for the worm I staked a dozen dunes on top of each other then it was a matter of shaping it and adding details to the overall image. The total time was about 8 to 12 hours.
P H O T O
M A N I P U L AT I O N S
E N E R G Y
C O L L E C T O R
I’ll start by saying that this piece took me 160 hours to finish, really slow even for my standards. This started as an attempt to make a realistic version of a creature, Sin from Final Fantasy 10, but it kept evolving into his own world, until it ended like this. I had to learn a lot to finish this, perspective was something I never gave much attention before this work, none the less it was fundamental in order to
make a clean image, drawing was something that I didn’t normally mix too much with photos, however almost all the buildings were made from scratch, the little patch of grass too, plus many parts of the whale creature and bridge parts. All done in Photoshop. A concept behind all of this flashy imagery kept forming, I imagined the whale creatures
capable of absorbing the static electricity in the moisture of the air and send it through their bodies and out so that the energy collectors can, well, collect it, powering all the city bellow.
N Y X O F
T H E T H E
G O D D E S S N I G H T
In a time when creative juices were running quite low, mostly because of work, I delved in books while on the bus and watched anime on my spare time at home. None the less the idea of a Greek Goddess kept coming to me and after a light research I settled with Nyx the Goddess of the Night, as the title suggests, “A shadowy figure, Nyx stood at or near the beginning of creation�, this description was
what made me decide. I really enjoy the light effect on this one, the dust particles, simple as they are, add so much to the overall piece. All done in Photoshop in about two days.
F I R E
E L E M E N TA L
This started as training in both in fire photo manipulation and in scale. The giant creature was mainly based in some wonderful artworks of the game Shadow of the Colossus, then the idea of having a clash between elements, clichĂŠ as it is, is still a lot of fun to do. The giant ice bird was the most challenging partly because in order to blend the wing with ice particles I had to use techniques until then
strange to me. In the end I decided to desaturate the whole image and paint it by hand in order to give the tones I wanted instead of changing the colour of the different layers, this makes it look more like a painting. After three weeks of my spare time I achieved the end result you see above.
A N D R O M E D A This belongs to a series I made a while back, all the pieces consisted of female bodies in a kind of surreal and fantastic settings, minimalistic and monochromatic. It was great training concerning the female shape. I actually find it challenging to talk about this piece, not because it was hard to make or because I think it’s controversial, but because it
reflects so well my inner thoughts, it’s almost frightening, the way I think about the universe and our place in it, our scale in comparison with the huge stellar bodies. It is all present in this piece, it is beyond doubt one of my personal favourites.
W O R L D
C R E AT I O N
This one took me something like twenty hours to finish and it is loosely inspired in Japanese mythology more precisely in the history of izanami and izanagi. “The first gods summoned two divine beings into existence, the male Izanagi and the female Izanami, and charged them with creating the first land. The two deities then went to the bridge between heaven and earth, and churned the sea below with a
spear. When drops of salty water fell from the spear, Onogoroshima (“self-forming island”) was created.” Wikipedia Article. I particularly enjoy the contrast of tones, pinks and reds clashing with the blues and greens.
G L A D O S Another one of my female pieces, this was actually a group of things mashed up together, since it wasn’t consciously planed as it appeared in one of my dreams, even if they are a rare thing for me to remember. Concerning the image itself, is one is yet again deeply personal, it symbolises that even with infinite power to create there are always chains that drag us back and limits the creator movements.
D E S I G N
U R B A N
F I C T I O N
Urban Fiction was a personal project of mine, I wanted to make a Science Fiction magazine that talked about sci fi regardless of the midium, books and movies both old and new. I designed all the pages and made most of the publicity, the font in the titles was also designed by me
B A H A M U T One of the proudest moments I can remember was when I finished this font not only in illustrator but also the lengthy process of transferring it to fontographer 5o be able to type on the keyboard and see my own font forming words and sentences was an exhilarating moment, after all, typography is one of my favourite subjects concerning design.
Regarding the font, it reflects to a great extent my visual taste, since it has an overall futuristic appearance with only straight lines but at the same time it has an acknowledgement of past aesthetics with the semi serifs. All of the titles in this portfolio were writen using this font.
P O R T U G U E S E
L O T T E R Y
A contest was held in order to determine the new design for a portuguese lottery, unfortunally I didn’t win, regardless I find this was a particular good bit of training in illustrator due to the complexety of somo of the ornaments. The theme was basically a more tradicional portugal. As such I based my design on the 1000 escudos bill you can see above, originally it bellonged to the old por-
tuguese banks based on the collonies. There were two reasons to why I chose this bill, first, beeing from the portuguese collonies it recalls a time when portuguese stood pround amongst the many kingdoms and empires of the world, second I find it simply beautifull. Concerning the colors, I made some combinations based on the painting above made by portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza Cardoso.
S I M U
F L O W
A spiritual successor to the magazine shown a few pages behind, this magazine was just an excuse to see how I would make the same concept with a few years in between the two projects. I was rather pleased with the result, since it shows, from my point of view at least, a more matured way of thinking about the problems, using simple solutions and making better use of my wide range of skills
to achieve what I feel is my true design style, minimalistic and monochromatic. As for the huge planet on the cover, it’s supposed to represent Trantor, the metal covered planet and home of the emperor of the galactic empire in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I made the brush on the left in Illustrator so that I could use it as an alpha
brush in ZBrush, achieving the illusion of small buildings over the surface of the entire object.
L E X I M AT I C A lot of fun time searching went into this particular repackaging project. The goal was to redesign tha bottom right package into a more appealing look. The product concists of a special type of bleach made only for waching machines. Literally the first thing that passed my mind was to make the box look like a miniature washing machine and even though I tried many other things I went with a vintage/
popart looking washing machine. After the main one was made I thought on expanding the brand into different kinds of bleaches, like aromatic ones or bleach for black clothes. So I setled with a red color for the original one, meaning leadership, green for the lime scented one representng nature and black for the one made for black clothes, obviously.
I also wanted to make a noticeble difference between them beside the colors, so the symbols you see above based on the different kinds of halos, triangular for god, circular for saints and square for the living, were distributed amongst the three products.
P H O T O G R A P H Y
My first finished model on Zbrush. It served mainly to learn the program, how to model the object, how to add texture, how to render, basically all the steps necessary to get to a finished image
T H R E E
D I M E N S I O N A L
M A S K E D
E Y E S
My first finished model on Zbrush. It served mainly to learn the program, how to model the object, how to add texture, how to render, basically all the steps necessary to get to a finished image
L A N D S C A P E S All of the above images where done with vue 10, an extremely powerful tool whenever the subject is landscapes. The top picture was done for a photo manipulation since the end result of a vue render is more realistic than my drawings and a realistic feel was what I envisioned for the end image, I made it in vue. The bottom ones were part of a simple light test I. As for the middle one, after
seeing an image of an artist that resembled a small planet but was actually an extremely distorted panoramic I wandered if I could do a similar thing in 3D and the answer was yes.
S O FA Modeled in 3DS MAX and rendered in keyshot. This was only made in order to learn both programs. It was great fun none the less.
A L I E N
T E N TA C L E S
This was based on the works of Ikameka and served the major purpose of training both hard and soft surfaces as well as how they work together. It was wonderful to do this one, all done on ZBrush over a period of a week, it taught me many things about colouring and the proper use of alpha textures. Regarding the creature although it isn’t my original design it transmits a style I deeply enjoy, the
mixture of hard mechanical pieces with raw flesh, reminiscent of the style used in the movie Akira, it truly is a feast to my eyes. Finally, the post processing steps in Photoshop after the final render, was something found extremely necessary in order to have a more presentable image, it was great training in that regard as well.