Juan Solorzano

Juan Solorzano is a professional artist and designer, who lives in Hampton Roads, Virginia, United States, and studied at Oxford College in the Liberal Arts, but most of his training and skills are self taught.  He has had over 20 years creating custom and detailed illustrations and designs and in the past 5 years he has worked as a professional graphic designer for an online web company and is very passionate about designing in general. As well as working on computer in graphic design, he specializes in airbrushing and oil painted portraits, and even does drawing tutorials.

The type of work he generally does it digital painting for book covers, album (cd) covers, posters, and portraits, both real and fictional. He creates his masterpieces on a Corel Painter Software in combinations with a Wacom Tablet, which allows him to create what he calls artistic movement and focus on details of his work by creating painted effects like water colours, oils, pencils, and acrylics. As well as this software, he likes to work on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and if needed, depending on the project, Flash.

Solorzano mostly creates his work by request, and does it for other people. He is an artist for hire, and gets his outlines for his projects mostly this way, but he does create his own individual art works himself too. All of the pieces he creates are for a variety of businesses and enjoyment, both for  personal and commercial use. The majority of the artwork he creates, however, is mostly cartoon and fantasy based. Solorzano likes to convey a magical and joyful feeling and express the wonder of story telling in his pieces, which he feels he is able to capture in these particular art from subjects. In most of the digital drawing and or paintings he creates of people created in a more cartoon form, he likes to try and add the “Steampunk look” to his creations; he does this to add an edgy feel and allows the images to be viewed in a different manner; his passion has developed into writing and illustrating his own fairy-tale and fantasy stories.

An example of this is when he created a lot of Alice In Wonderland artwork with the steam punk feel, to add some edge to the classical story. He felt that since the Wonderland story was written and set in the late 1800’s Victorian era, where the Steampunk era derives from the same time, so it tied in nicely with the Wonderland theme. Following these paragraphs is a poster he did titled Tea Party; it was derived from the classical Alice in Wonderland story and tied in to an event hosted at a coffee shop. It was created to be a fun piece to draw a crowd, and the poster itself was hand-drawn and painted digitally using a tablet.

Although he is an artist for hire, Solorzano also does work for other people. He is at the point in his life where he wants to be hired less and start creating work for himself and helping others. He feels he wants to share and contribute his skills and artistic knowledge with the world.  This means he creates drawing lessons created digitally and screen recorded using brushes that simulate pencils, to help young people widen their knowledge on art, whether it be the basic principles of sketching, or learning how to draw detailed pictures, like eyes and figures. All his drawing tutorials can be found via his website http://sketch2draw.com/ or his youtube channel.

The main reason I’ve chosen Solorzano for my inspiration for my culminating project is because of the piece, or pieces he created in the theme of Alice and Wonderland. I, myself, decided that I wanted to create a piece of artwork with the Wonderland theme, and decided on creating a deck of playing cards. Solorzano himself actually created a deck of playing cards that have become some of my main inspiration for the creation process in my own artwork for this particular project. He decided to add the next chapters in Alice’s life and design them himself from his own thoughts of where she would go, in a story telling process. He wanted to take the same love and passion people reminisce about and out them into a deck of playing cards- a deck that comes from his own vision of Wonderland. For this project, he himself was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Dodgson) original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and wanted to take the story further as a young lady who earns the tittle “Alice OF Wonderland”. His deck overall, as stated in earlier paragraphs, captures the SteamPunk Wonderland theme.

Below, are some pictures of the cards, as well as a video link of his cards he created, capturing both himself, his story and back story about the cards, and even some of the sketching process in creating some of the cards.

If you want to see more examples of Solorzano work that aren’t posted below, visit his website link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/jsolorzanoarts

The following are some examples of the artwork Solorzano creates:

Tea Party

Fantasy Lights