There are some people who draw in a way that looks like they load their pens with pure liquified fun.
Concept artist Marcos Mateu-Mestre has a wonderful character of line and a jaunty, casual style that makes it look like the lines danced out and created the image of their own accord.
His loose, relaxed application of color, which careens between brilliant lights and rich, atmospheric darks, just adds to the visual treat.
Mateu-Mestre started out doing adventure comic strips for a newspaper in his native Spain. He went to work in London doing backgrounds and layouts for Amblimation-Universal Pictures and then moved to LA and worked on Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado.
He now has his own studio and has done production design for animated films like The Three wise Men for Animagic Studios and Totó Sapore for Lanterna Magica.
His site is filled with production design drawings and paintings, character designs, background renderings, storyboards and even a couple of comics pages. You’ll be delighted by the variety of approach, color scheme and materials handling throughout the galleries. There is a wonderful consistency, though, in his elastic, confident linework, excellent draughtsmanship and vivid imagination.
Mateu-Mestre’s drawings have just the right touch of exaggeration to give them extra visual appeal; lines are given an extra spring, forms bent out just a bit, and figures swirled into motion in a way that gives everything a sense of verve and life.
Along with Marcelo Vignali and Armand Serrano, who I recently profiled, Matau-Mestre is also part of Sketchclub and is a participant in the El Pacifico collaborative improvisational comic book experiment.
