Illustration and Comic Art in Barcelona

Single pieces of illustration made in Barcelona: editorial commissions, picture book pages, comic pages, character designs and personal work. Each one comes up at full size with the illustrator's own note on what it was for and what it was made with.

Comics carry a lot of weight here. Publishers work in both Catalan and Spanish, fairs take over a whole weekend, and specialist bookshops keep authors going the rest of the year. In the artist pages that shows up as full pages, storyboards, inks and colour tests rather than the one panel that looked good on its own.

One image on its own is a poor sample. Any of them leads to the artist page of the person who made it, with the rest of their portfolio and the contact details they publish there: email, phone, website, social links. In a city with this much editorial commissioning, that route, piece to portfolio to email address, is how most work gets handed out.

Editorial illustration from this city runs mostly in the press and on covers, formats where the image sits beside text the artist does not control, which is why the caption explains the brief. Any piece can carry video and audio, so process clips turn up, and so do pages lettered in Catalan next to the same page in Spanish.