14 Oct 2019
As we told you in our last post, during this last September we did two international trips (to Marseille and Colombia). Today, we will tell you a bit about the first one, which we did under CHEBEC program.
Project Chebec (Hacking the Mediterranean economy through the Creative and Cultural Sector) is funded by European Union Interreg MED's fund, and supports Cultural and Creative Indutries's access to new markets while keeping their own identity, with the final aim to favor MED clusters (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, or Serbia) attractiveness for creative people.
Drawfolio has been one of the chosen projects for this program in Valencia, where EconCult (Area of Research in Economics of Culture from the Faculty of Economics of University of Valencia) is one of the partners of the european project. During this year, we have been attending a course about internationalization and european funding.
During the program, 3 mobility events are held (Sevilla, Marsella, and Bologna), where some of the projects in the program are put together to network between them and with cultural actors from the host city. We were one of the selected projects to go from Valencia to Marseille mobility event, along with PhotOn Festival, Barret Cooperativa, La Cosecha, Russafa Escénica, Ikebanah Producciones, and Saltarinas.
During the 3 days where "Culture makes the world go round : rencontres professionnelles" (the mobility event in Marseille) took place, we had some activities aimed to do networking and find potential collaborators with the other 40 CCI projects from the various regions, and also some talks from the Chebec partners and European Union's Interreg MED fund.
The place where the mobility event was stunning: La Friche Belle de Mai. A former tobacco factory, La Friche is one of the most vibrant culture centers in Marseille and France. The space is huge, with various large exhibition rooms, theaters, rehearse rooms, concert halls, restaurants, a book shop, a skate park, and office and workshop spaces for nearly 70 cultural organizations. Among them is AMI (Aide aux Musiques Innovatrices), one of the chebec's partners.
We also had the chance to visit other cultural spaces in the city. We were lucky enough to get a exclusive guided tour on Marseille's FRAC (Contemporary Art Regional Fund). We could appreciate the architeture of Marseille's FRAC building, and see all the current exhibitions (there is no permanent collection at the FRACs), discovering interesting artists such as Cristof Yvoré or Nicolas Daubanes.
They where 4 pretty busy days, but we discovered Marseille as a vibrant city full of artistic and creative initiatives, with significant players. We got to meet lots of visual, scenic, and music arts projects from Barcelona, Sevilla, Évora, Bolonia, Roma, Lyon, Marsella, and Sarajevo. The CHEBEC program keeps on: right now, we are on the mentoring phase, in order to build our internationalization plan. We'll keep you posted!
08 Oct 2019
We are back! We know that it has ben a while since we last published on this blog, but we have been getting some new stuff ready, and we did two short trips to Marseille (as part of European Union's CHEBEC program) and to Colombia (as part of the RedEmprendia Landing program), aside from being part of Prime The Animation 2019. We are building content to tell you all that we did and learnt there, but meanwhile.. it is Inktober already!!
As we did last year, we created a special index in "Discover Artists" to showcase all the inktober works from our users.
To be shown there, just upload your inktober works to your portfolio website, go to "Edit" on each picture and tag it with the "inktober2019" (no need to put #) tag in "Tags".
And, as we did last year we will be giving away one year of PRO Plan for free to the artist whose work has the most likes in that list. To allow everyone to have enough time to upload everything and receive likes, we will be waiting until 15th of November to find the winner.
No matter if you follow the original Inktober by Jake Parker, or maybe Catalina Novelli's version, or your own Inktober: the main goal is to learn and share!
We hope to see your work, and Happy Inktober!
01 Jul 2019
It is summer, the heat has come, and in Drawfolio is time to launch discounts!
From this day to next September, you can have a 30% discount on your first year of PRO Plan, to make it more easy for you to have a great portfolio website that will get you opportunities and new customers.
You don't need to do anything special: the first year of all PRO plans will just cost 51,95$ instead of 75$.
10 Jun 2019
We are bringing today something special for our PRO customers. These years we focused in steadily improving Drawfolio as a product, and although we launched "Discover Artists" and we promote our users on our blog and social media, we were not building much of a community between our users.
That's why, after talking to some of our PRO customers and validating the idea made sense, we are making the first step launching the Drawfolio Community Slack. We hope this will enable our PROs to build networks, share ideas and knowledge, and get to know each other.
If you don't know what Slack is, a brief summary: it is basically a private chat you can use via a web browser or mobile app, focused on team colaboration. Aside from the most familiar, whatsapp-like features (like chat, emojis, sharing videos and images), you can create new chat rooms, conversation threads, surveys, and much more.
If you are on PRO Plan, you should have an email with a private link to register into our Drawfolio Community Slack. If you don't find it, or have any problem registering into it, please contact us at uservoice or write us at [email protected].
See you on Drawfolio Community!
28 May 2019
We are super-happy today, because we are bringing back Laura Pérez to our blog. Aside from illustraiting for clients such as The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, or National Geographic (among others), Laura just published "Ocultos" with Astiberri, and we talked with her to know everything about her new comic-book.
Before talking about "Ocultos", and just in case someone still does not know about you: Who is Laura Perez?
Laura is someone who draws every day, because years ago she found out that was the thing she was best at. I work as an Illustrator since I finished my college degree, and more recently I work on comics/graphic novels, too.
Ocultos is your second graphic novel (after "Náufragos", where Pablo Monforte wrote the script), but is the first time you are in charge of everything. Where does this new idea and story come from?
The idea has been around my mind for some time. After publishing "Naúfragos" I felt more than ever the urge to tell my own stories, with my own voice. Working on commercial illustration, or illustrating other people's script, you always tell a story from an already built basis. I needed to find out a whole narrative voice of my own.
Mystery and the Occult always have interested me. I grew up with stories about spirits, psychic weirdness and other phenomena that, looking back, was not normal at all. But it wasn't until now that I decided to use that atmosphere to tell small stories that refer to these themes.
After reading "Ocultos", it felt very much in the symbolist tradition of Marcel Schwob's short stories, but with your own imaginarium and personality. A lot of the short stories in the comic book are silent, or barely have text. What made you take that approach, which is a bit inusual on comic-books?
I think I may be more influenced by cinema than by other comic-books. I love all kinds of cinema, but specially silent films and experimental narratives. You can tell a lot on scene without using words, and I love that.
I also like playing with slow paces, and setting some "slow motion" key moments, as if weirdeness made everything stop. And that happens to us when we experience time as fast or slow. Mental time is a very subjective matter, and you can show that in a comic-book very effectively.
Your stories are full of ghosts, aliens, and other worlds, but also day-to-day details and human sensations (like loneliness). Where these ideas come from, and how your worked on them and selected them to include in the collection?
It seems that when we talk about ghosts or aliens we put that in a drawer, and when we talk about other human experiences we put that in another whole separate drawer because you talk more about the day-to-day ones. I think all stuff is related to human perception and experiences. Some people have lived weird situations during ther lives: maybe they talked about them or not, but to some extent we all have lived a situation where something didn't quite fit with what we've been told traditionally on books or school.
That's where the ideas in the comic book come from: talking about we don't see but we intuit, and the very few certainties that we end getting. The things that are told to us, are to be questioned under our own analysis.
Choosing which stories to tell was very hard, too. All of them were written in notebooks, papers, or audio notes. Some of the were lost, other discarded, and others chosen to be included. In the end, I let myself be carried away by the stories that "emerged" more naturally, trying to keep a consistent theme that would give a sense of unity once you finish reading the book (or at least, that's what I tried to do!)
On the technical side, you keep using both traditional and digital techniques, and you also chose to do "Ocultos" in landscape format (not the most usual thing for a comic book). Can you tell us a bit more about your process??
Almost all my sketchbooks are landscape notebooks, I love that format. It didn't take me much time to decide the same format for the comic book: it made sense.
Lots of the stories in the book come from those landscape sketchbooks. Some were born out of an image, or others from a sentence or a concept. The process was very organic, so chaos also came into play more than once. But with blind faith on being able to resolve an artistic conflict (which I sometimes didn't even understand), everything came to order.
What did you discover and learn with this project and journey?
I learnt that along the way numberless obstacles will always appear, and being in shape is the best way to dodge them.
And last, but not least: What can we expect from Laura Perez on the next months?
I hope to keep developing more stories. Some of them very "Ocultos"-like, and others will be very different.
Thanks a lot, Laura!
