Duration: Seven years.

Location: Atlanta, GA.

Education: BA from University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus; MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta Campus.

Artistic influences: My childhood in the Caribbean defined my color choices—I grew up surrounded by flurries of saturated colors that always balanced each other in the right ways. My illustration style is influenced by a mash up of four aspects: the exceedingly colorful but dark-themed work of Puerto Rican printmakers, odd comics that weren’t really about superheroes, Japanese anime and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The latter was my introduction to fine art: the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico houses a massive collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Favorite projects: I love everything I’ve done for the science fiction and fantasy publication website Tor.com. Working with Tor.com’s art director Irene Gallo is a joy; she knows just how to match the right story with the right artist, and knows how to set up the perfect combination that lets the artist flourish. 

Work environment: After sharing a studio for a while, I now work from home, and my studio is incredibly tiny: literally, my space is a corner of roughly four-by-four inches, and I use one desk crammed with a 27-inch iMac, a magic trackpad under my left hand and a Wacom tablet under my right. While it can be a bit lonely working by myself, I feel like I’m terribly susceptible to influence, so I have to avoid browsing other visuals when I’m trying to come up with one myself.

Aspirations: I want to create comics—not just covers, but the whole package. My current schedule doesn’t enable me to venture too deeply into creating a graphic novel, but I’d be lying if I said that nothing was in the works. It would also be fantastic to work on more odd projects that incorporate surface design. As a solely digital illustrator, producing an artifact with your art on it seems fascinating. It certainly spices things up compared to only creating prints.