Where to buy rafael lopez

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For information on ordering books, publicity or permissions requests,. Macmillan Kids. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Charlesbridge Publishing. To learn more visit:. My calendar is currently full with speaker visits and murals. For more information on commercial illustration.

Your details were sent successfully! Children's Books. I live and work in a loft that was a 's car garage in San Diego, California and the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with my wife and son. A shout out to all the children and dedicated volunteers who make a difference one brush stroke at a time. I'm grateful for the chance to talk about books and literacy or make murals and connect with diverse audiences of all ages, large and small. Due to a very busy schedule creating many new books in the studio, and previously scheduled visits and murals I am fully booked for For more information on speaker visits or conference presentations please contact: The Author Village For all book inquiries please contact my literary agents at Full Circle Literary.

Stefanie Von Borstel Adriana Dominguez For more information on commercial illustration or murals thanks for connecting via the contact form below. To get more information or see additional portfolio work Visit rafaellopez. For all book illustration inquiries and visits please contact my literary agents at Full Circle Literary.

Stefanie Sanchez Von Borstel Stefanie fullcircleliterary. Jump to navigation Jump to Content. Rafael was chosen as the artist for the National Book Festival poster!

Take a look at the progression of the poster on The Washington Post website. I started in a pretty unorthodox way, which is drawing on big giant paper rolls. My uncle used to work in a, or labored in a paper mill, and then when I ran out of that paper, I started drawing on the walls with the approval of my mom and my dad. First of all, both my parents are architects, so my first trials and experiences was helping at my parents' studio. You know, I was doing a lot of ruining their work.

They had a lot of architectural renderings that they needed to present to their client, and I thought they'd like a little color, so I started adding suns and moons and things around them, to the dismay of my parents, because once they discovered it they had to work overnight to fix what I'd done and start all over again. So maybe that was it. My first trial. How I decided that this was become a professional life and a career, was actually the job of a teacher.

I used to have mild dyslexia, and really struggled through school, and I always saw drawing as my way of refuge, with my trouble with writing. And my mom was a little concerned that I was falling behind from the rest of my peers, and she came and talked to this teacher. I was probably like in fourth or fifth grade. And she says, "I'm really worried about Rafa. Rafa's not catching up with the rest of the kids with reading and writing.

You know, he's not gonna be a writer. He's gonna be an artist, so just go home, relax. I believe that you don't have to force it. I think that it just happens naturally. I think that is so ingrained in who you are as a person that when you walk through your life and you're growing up, you're soaking all these things that are around you that… it is just naturally coming out when you're drawing, so I think you're not aware in the beginning, and then people tell you.

They tell you, "Wow. You look so colorful, so vibrant. Or, you have this Latino thing. It's always been there, you know, it's always been your friend and companion through your career.

But I think it's better not to force it, just to let it just flow and be what it is. So what things influenced me that were pretty obvious from Mexico and the street life and everything, and my culture, I think were… there are many things.

Obviously the color of my country. I think it's in some way, having this color. I mean, we don't have chromophobia in Mexico. We love color. And I think it's a way to preserve this spirit of childhood, you know, and the spirit of wonder.

So color is very important, and I think that's one of the biggest influences. There's a lot of texture in my work, and I live in a city called San Miguel de Allende and it's like a 17th-century, 18th-century city where you are surrounded by textures, beautiful old textures. But also the work of muralists. I love the power of the muralists, like Diego Rivera, and Siqueiros and Orozco. So I think that I like to convey this feeling of this heroic figures in some way into my work. You know, I don't know how I do it, but I… they definitely influenced me a lot.

The colors that I use in my work are ; actually, they come from Mexico. There's a little tiendita called El Pato that is just down the hill from my house in San Miguel de Allende, and I walk down there and I buy these big jars. You know, they could hold like medical specimens. You know, they're just gigantic. And the color's very vibrant compared to the color that I can get in the States, besides the fact that color in the States is really expensive. So my backgrounds are done with this Mexican colors that are really, really strong, and some of the colors are very difficult to find, like the rosa Mexicano.

Most of the color you get here in the States is just pink, but the pink from Mexico has got something in there, and they've got a little extra kick. Just out of school, I started using different medias, media, and I finally decided that I feel more comfortable working with acrylics. I like them because I'm an illustrator, I needed to turn in things very quickly, so oil would take forever to dry.

Pastel was too messy to ship and ship to the client. So I decided that oil was something… I mean, acrylic was something that really worked with me and my schedule. So I worked with wood, because — especially old wood, beat-up wood — because it's got a lot of texture and that reminds me of those walls from Mexico.

So I would say my media is acrylic on wood. The way I began illustrating books for kids was just a total call out of the blue. I'd been an illustrator for almost 15 years when I got the call from a small publisher, house publisher, that was called Moon Rising, that has been, since been bought by a bigger company, but they had seen my work, don't ask me where.

They had followed my work. They've seen it a couple of times, and they thought that the subject that they wanted to color on this new book would be very fitting with my style. So it was one of those calls that you get out of nowhere. I never thought that my work would really apply well to children's books, but here I am, seven years later, and I'm still busy, so it's great. The way it's different from my previous work, the way books are different, is that you have to in a way tell a story and keep a consistency and produce more than one painting.

So there lies the challenge, in keeping with this consistency lies the challenge of how do you do it? You know, so I was pretty terrified in the beginning.

And I think that's the biggest difference, that you're not just saying something in one painting. You have to do it with 16 or 17 or 20 paintings. So the way I approached the story was pretty much make up as you go. I mean, I never really met personally anyone that was a children's illustrator, although I admire many people.

I never had the opportunity to really talk to someone and say, how do you do this? So I understood who my audience was, even though at the time my child was just a baby, but I knew I have cousins and nephews and people so I had the experience of being with kids. I needed to find the… I would create a character that would convey a lot of the characteristics and personality of Celia Cruz, and then just let it roll and have fun with it, and sort of like describe what the — in a visual way — what the text was saying.

So, to describe how I start with my next, or any topic when I do a book, I create what I call the mood boards. And mood boards are things of photos and reference of the life of the person or the subject, the subject that I'm covering. So I go down to the library. I download things from the internet.

I search things I already have about the people that I'm gonna be coloring or painting. And I create these giant pieces of paper that I put all around my wall. And of course, the most important thing if you're covering a musician is to put the music they play.

So once you get in the mood, it's a lot easier. Things flow a lot faster. But, you know, you don't wanna make a book where every page she's on the stage singing, even if the copy says that she sings a lot. So I believe that kids are, I'm sure of this, kids are very, very sophisticated with their minds, and you can be a little more poetic with the visual description of what's going on, and besides, don't you like sing when you're in the shower, or you know, jumping in a field of flowers?

So she doesn't necessarily need to sing on a stage. She could be singing in her dreams, you know. So I thought once I made that decision, it was gonna be very easy to put her in different scenery, and do this poetic approach to it.

We had a challenge where the text described her leaving Cuba just before the revolution, and one of the things that we agreed to do was to not show violence, or show things in a very graphic way or literal way. So again, I go back to a way of doing things a little more symbolically or poetic or conceptually.

So what I did is I decided to have her sort of like float, and leaving this field of sugar canes, and leaving a lot of her papers and song writings behind. They stay in Cuba, basically saying my spirit stays with my land and my country and my motherland.