Influence Map

Yup, I forgot to add my name there

Anyways I decided to keep the suggested proportions because I've always seen the way people are unable to discriminate between their preferences and favourites as a lack of introspection.

So let's go in order of appearance:

1.- Dinosaurs!!
Ain't them awesome? I swear from the second I saw a dinosaur for the first time there was no thing more interesting to me. I went on to learn all I could about them, memorizing the names, looks, diets and ethnicity of at least 200 different species by the time I was 9.
How many kids learn to read before school-age just to be able to learn more about dinosaurs?
Dinosaurs were the first thing I drew.

2.- Women.
And not just any women, but pretty women. I could have been the author of that Sweeney Todd song.
Women are special to me. Why? I don't know.
It's not merely sexual nor romantic, more in the lines of perceived value and aesthetics I would guess, since I grew up in a world where men outnumbrered women in a 6 to 1 basis, yet my home was always filled with girls. So it could be that I feel closer to home when playing as Lara Croft, watching a Milla Jovovich or Angelina Jolie movie or drawing my own dear Valeria than when doing the same with any male counterpart.
Or it could be that I just feel more freedom emanating from the pixies of the world, than from the rest, so common and tired in their looks that they could be shackled to the floor and the image wouldn't change much. Jessica Stam, the girl in the pic, plays one such lovely pixie in the Ricci Ricci by C.R. commercial.

3.- Glen Keane.
This man is the master of gesture and expression in animation. Almost all of my favourite Disney characters of all time were animated by him; Ratigan, Ariel, Marahute, The Beast, Tarzan, Long John Silver. In fact, the only one of my faves he didn't do was Scar.
If it wasn't for this man I wouldn't even like animation.

4.- Final Fantasy.
The no. 1, the first, the REAL FF, before emo characters, stupid convoluted plots (tho time traveling to the past in order to take revenge in the future was weird enough of Garland there). This game didn't need a fuckzillion belts and zippers nor fancy hairstyles or angst. It had all it needed: Freedom and challenge.
You picked your team of four from six archetypes and you were on to save the world as the warriors of light, but that was it for the characters. They had no name, no personality, no specialy defined design, all of that was up to you and I was incredibly fun because everytime you started over you could make things very different from the start.
I made up a million characters out of the 6 light-warrior archetypes and made up a million more adventures for them.
It's a true shame however, that Final Fantasy has devolved into a piece of shit where the only decision you take is to press X or turn off the console, and the only second you use your imagination is while imagining what would it be to play a real game while you wait for the characters to stop their convoluted, emotionless monologues and the game tells you to press x...again.

5.- The World.
Yup, the big blue-green ball is my principal source of inspiration. It's massive, ever-changing and even in the midst of cosmic chaos, it makes sence.
You don't need to inhale some weird shit or pray or "look out for your inner voice" in order to create awesome stuff as an artist, all you need is to take a walk and look around. No matter what your art is about the world has something to offer to you, and you can be sure everytime you take that walk there will be something new and different there.

6.- Emilie Autumn.
Music always pulls me away from the apathic cespool of pain my genethics have decided to put me in once a while.
I despise silence because it lets me hear things I don't want to hear and keeps me awake and sickly thinking of things I don't want to think about. So I have made it a rule since a very young age to never let silence be part of my life and in order to acomplish this, I have always been in the look out for new music.
To be fair and sincere, I will tell you I've heard almost everything, from pop to death-techno-wathevertheshit, but very few times did I listen, and one of those times were when this lovely voice blasted shakespeare quotes inbetween hapsichord music and industrial bangs.
I was curious and curiosity led me to lyrics packed of feeling, from rebelious to melancholic and sarcastic of sleepless nights and the loneliness those bring. Opinionated and reckless, educated and ellegant, Emilie sang something I could understand because it was something I had lived.
Meeting her in person has been one of the most delightful experiences, she saved my life.

7.- R. K. Post.
It was a dark age called junior high-school, my mind was packed with ghosts, vampires, dark angels and hallucinations I wasn't anyhow able to picture myself and help get out of my soul. But he was.
I saw the dark beauty and the bizarre horror I pictured in my mind brought to life by him, and knew it was not impossible to capture those unreal beings in paper and let them be there, and so I started drawing again after two years of not even trying out of a lack of understanding of what I pictured in my head.

8.- Magic: The Gathering.
High School again, with an almost completely incompetent backyard for recess, many breaks in between classes and an interesting twist of faith, four of my friends and myself all discovered the game on our own at almost the same time, and intruducing our opinions of it to each other, made it our recess hobby.
Getting to know the game-store world, the economics of the game and the years of constant success, looking at my Magic cards and aweing at the works of Post, Guay, Spears, etc. Was the first time I even tought of illustration as a possible career option, and to this day, getting to become an illustrator at Wizards of The Coast is my principal goal as an artist.

9.- Batman.
Batman is THE SUPERHERO to me, while I may have grown to become a comic-book fan and my bookshelves may be filled of Marvel, Image and such, the Batman comics are the ones I would save in case of a fire.
Batman is the hero I want to be, or at least write "when I grow up"

10.- Disney.
I'll be blunt, I grew up with Thundercats, He-Man, TMNT and Gatchaman, but I'm completely certain due to my aberration to anime and a good number of cartoons, that I wouldn't give a dime about animation if Disney hadn't been there with movies such as The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, etc. To make me feel it could be more than just cartoons. It could be more than just a blonde bobcut muscle punching skulls and giving a moral lesson.
Animation, as Disney produced it, could make dreams come true!

11.- J.R.R. Tolkien.
The man above his work, for it is him who inspires me, not Bilbo or Frodo. This was a man who saw beyond and knew how to teach a lesson thru fantasy. A man who gives us his experience thru pre-Industrial Revolution England and World War I in a series of books so incredibly well developed he must have imagined even the most minimal dewdrop in order to have been able to make it all so real, so solid.
Tolkien's ability to make the reader suspend disbelief in such an educated and unperceivable way is, in my opinion, the Holy Grail of fantastic literature.

12.- The Legend of Zelda.
When I was 4, my gandpa gave me the NES with a crate of about 20 games. Zelda wasn't the first to be played, but it certainly was the most influential to me.
I already knew how to read thanks to my dinosaur addiction, but this wasn't in spanish, and unlike other games, I realized I didn't know what the hell I had to do without being able to read, so you have here this 5 year old kid with a dictionary in hand learning a foreign language on his own from a videogame.
Zelda's world was huge, and most of it was a forest, kinda like the one around my house, wich made me wonder if there were waterfalls and lakes out there, perhaps a fairy and some orks, and I started letting my imagination run rampant around those toughts wich grew with my education, to become a special interest and a great tolerance for foreign places, cultures and people.

13.- Mauricio Herrera.
Last but certainly not least, this man had a huge effect on me even before I got to know him in person just out of a simple fact: He showed me "impossible" is bullshit.
We're both from latin-america, he's from Chile, I'm from Mexico and both countrie's industries are filled with kind of the same shitheaded people running things the way their retrograde bosses did before they got in charge. And these people are very quick and happy to say "That's impossible, there's no market for that".
As my love for Magic and Batman grew, I started contemplating the possibility of having a TCG or a comic book made in my country, being able to work for something like that wich I loved so much, but all I kept reading and listening around me was "It's impossible", again and again and again. So I decided to be a psychologist instead, they seemed to get a lot of money with quite little effort after all.
And then I heard about Mitos y Leyendas, a TCG from Chile that hadn't just been around for a couple months and died, no, it had been on the market for five years and actualy was competition to both Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh in latin-america. I was surprised and started playing, realizing how fun and good the game was, it was then when I decided to go back to my old dreams and picked up the pencil again because I now knew there was a guy in Chile to whom they said "It's impossible, don't even try it", and yet went on to give birth to one of the most memorable games ever produced in latin-america.

This was a long, long post, but it was necessary of me to explain why each and every one of these is so important and influential to me, won't judge you if you don't read, but maybe you'll find inspiration too, if you do

Thanks to for making this meme.