I will talk about my work, where it comes from and what was my path.
I will analyze my narrative choice and talk about 3 of my picture books, (Jemmy Button, The Forest, and Hundert)
I will talk about their process, the concept behind the book, their similarity, and differences.

Focusing on the nature that surrounds us in Quinta das Relvas, we will exercise or capacity of observation and work with simples natural shapes.
We will play with the concept of abstraction and his opposite.

I propose to present you some ways in which i find the medium of comic completely fascinating. How it is based on a strange alchemy that I often find underrated.
I'll propose you to try to understand together the nature and structure of what could be a comic and what possibility and place it offers to writers, drawers and readers.

You probably made a dream once. You try to remember one of your dream. You admit that remembering it is already in some way bending it. You take a paper. You fold it in a special way (don't worry, i'll show you). It is now an 8 page booklet. You can draw you dream, however you like it best (we'll find together how). You'll maybe feel a bit sad about this magic thing that was nebulous and secret becoming something so clear. But it's okay because you can now share your dream.

1. my journey as an illustrator,
2. all the mistakes I made since I started in 2010
3. what I learnt with them
We will also have space for debate and sharing of experiences that went wrong.

After a year of illustrating light Portuguese and Brazilian music to liven up your Mondays at the instragram (#storiesdamiserável), I decided to share the fun in this workshop where together you will going to listen to some music with the tip of the pencil on the paper.

Our minds are constantly on watch to recognize their familiar facial patterns in nowadays image-saturated culture. What do they feel, what do they think and what do they say about us? Let’s talk about characters!
Drawing on examples from selected artists and my body of work, we will explore the creative process behind illustrating characters.
We will examine the evolution of ideas, reinventing shapes, and infusing the drawing with a unique identity. Moreover we will fiddle with the idea of character’s personality being reflected onto the landscape which it inhabits. Finally, we will contemplate the possibility of transforming the designed idea into a real-life object.

This workshop will be dedicated to creating an illustration suspended in air.
The aim of the exercise is to explore our ability of reducing the illustration into shapes and imagining them as elements floating in space. I will encourage the participants to play with balance and scale in order to discover the visual potential of shifting sizes between the characters and their habitat within an illustration.
We will explore various techniques of creating and applying textures, experimenting with collage and “drawing with scissors”.
Finally the composition of created elements will be suspended from wires attached to a support and it will look amazing!

The conference will begin by a discussion on how the contemporary personal identity has become a highly reflective project, a dialogue with different images, sounds and cultural narratives. In a second moment the presentation will focus on the emergence of feelings of identification and recognition between the reader and the work of art – the notion of an intimate communion as a crucial moment for the identitary construction of young people. In a third moment, the concept of Fandom will be discussed as an important activity: a space for individual creation and personal empowerment. Finally, through my artistic work, and other artistic references, the conference will conclude with the depiction of the enigmatic passage that happens when the receiving subject (The Fan) becomes the creative individual (The Artist).

The workshop will be an exploration of the thematics of the conference. Through a selection of photographs/images on the internet, each participant will be asked to make a map of their musical, cinematic, sport, fashion or artistic influences, heroes or role figures. After each participant as a few images, they will be asked draw with a mix of artistic materials (felt tip pens, crayons, oil pastels etc) the images selected, so in the end each artist has a composition of drawings in a personal style, with a personal thematic: a little atlas of their imagetic universe.

At the conference I will present a bit of my work methodology and that will take us to what we will develop during the workshop. My working methods are most of the times related to live drawing and find out whatever is around me as a source of references - an exercise that releases me from being creatively blocked.

During the workshop we will develop a simple exercise outside where each participant will focus on anything he or she feels comfortable to draw. Afterwards we will work after these sketches and work on them as if they were going to be used on a final illustration, with different methods depending on what we want to achieve at the end: a personal project, an answer to a client's briefing, a painting on a big wall, etc.

The importance of the personal journey and its influence in the professional journey. Topics like the relationship with the client, the creative process, the hidden side of illustration and self-motivation will be addressed.

In this exercise we will leave aside the small drawings and change scale. Each participant will have to illustrate the excerpt of a short story, using only a large brush and three colors, so that in the end we create an out-of-scale book. This workshop will explore new ways of approaching illustration, combining concept, composition and form to a big format.

I will speak about the whole process of making Yōkai (titled La Montagne in France), one of my last picture books.
Every picture book is different, and you don’t really know how to make it until you have finished it.
A trip from nothing to the final result: how I research in my own child memories to find what I really want to tell, how some cultural references that I love are incorporated to the work (art painting, movies, books, games…), or how important is to use the sketchbook to think, test or discard ideas.
Making a picture book is not a direct line where ‘creativity’ is flowing all the time, and you also must be ready to accept that doubts and blocking moments are just part of the creation (although we always forget it).

A character.
A landscape.
Something happens there.
That’s all, you’ve got a picture book.
Well, not really, now you have to work.

…INVESTIGATION: Marta Soutinho

• Learn more about her work

Marta is a Visual artist, editorial designer, architect and researcher. Her practice dwells between a plethora of contexts associated with the materiality of objects and things: collage; illustration; the reusing of commonly found objects, artist’s book and more recently printmaking. In 2017 she was the winner of the 2nd Bienal Internacional de Arte de Gaia. At YETI she will share her experience as researcher on illustration.

…PUBLISHING: Miguel Gouveia

• Learn more about his work

At YETI Miguel Gouveia will share with us his experience as founder and director of Bruáa – Edição e Design: a story where two characters decided to join two passions that share the Art of telling stories: editing and design. The name? Well, it was hidden on a literary terms’ dictionary, just between braquicateléctico and burleta…