How did you decide you wanted to become an illustrator and get started in the creative industry? It all began in 2009 when I was still studying for my undergraduate degree in graphic design. I had been drawing since I was little, and at the time I used to post my drawings on the social network Fotolog. One of my classmates worked at a major magazine publisher in São Paulo and invited me to visit the newsroom. I made some contacts and started drawing regularly for several of the publisher’s magazines.

After a while, though, I became discouraged: I wasn’t doing very well in my drawing classes at university, and back then, I believed that a good illustrator had to be able to draw realistically and understand light, shadow and perspective—all the technical aspects we learned in school that I hated because they felt restrictive. I decided to stop drawing and instead focused on becoming an editorial graphic designer.

I worked for two years at a small book publisher when I came into contact with the work of many illustrators who used diverse and experimental techniques. That made me realize there were many ways to illustrate. I didn’t need to be able to draw an anatomically perfect skeleton to be a good editorial illustrator.

What personal experiences or circumstances have shaped your style? I have a special interest in nonacademic art. I’ve traveled to many countries and have always been drawn to aesthetics that emerge outside academic spaces and art that doesn’t follow pre-established rules or techniques, especially those rooted in European traditions. That’s exactly where my fascination lies: in the arts that come from collective and emotional spaces, guided more by intuitive and curious learning than by specific rules.

In addition to hand-drawn illustrations, you often feature collage elements, especially those with patterns or textures. How did you discover your love of collage? I don’t remember if there was a specific moment of discovery, but I’m enchanted by the endless combinations and compositions that only two different pieces can create and how the juxtaposition of images constantly shifts their meaning. It feels like a toy to me. I love the possibility of placing images in dialogue that may be very distant in time and space and seeing how they form something entirely new. Discovering what a single piece of colored paper contains within itself is a real game. Sometimes, just rotating a piece becomes a moment of discovery. I collect many materials during my travels, keep scraps of paper and also use Creative Commons images.

What do you enjoy about illustrating children’s books, and how does your creative process differ from your work on ad campaigns or editorials? Ángela Lago, a great Brazilian illustrator who passed away in 2017, once said: “There are things that can only happen in a book.” So, for me, that’s the question that drives me when I’m working on a book: What can only happen in this medium? Why can’t this be an animation or a painting? Why does it need to exist here?

A book contains time as well as space, so illustrating one means being an art director, set designer, costume designer, actor (to bring characters to life) and a reader as well. It requires diving deeply into the story and intimately researching the entire universe where the narrative takes place. For advertising or editorial work, I usually need to be much more agile as there’s much less time.

Tell us about your most recent book, Quem mora neste livro? (‘Who Lives In This Book?’). What inspired its creation, and what was it like to work on it? For a long time, I had wanted to create a book that could only exist physically; if it were to be read digitally, it would no longer work. I wanted it to need the materiality of the page and the page turn to exist.

Quem mora neste livro? includes many questions that invite children to engage with the story, and it has a touch of humor that is very important to me. The whole process was so much fun, imagining what kinds of characters might live inside a book and which parts of the pages they would choose to inhabit. I also consulted with many people during this project: I don’t like the idea of a solitary, “genius” creation, so I developed this book together with many others who helped open doors whenever I found myself stuck in a maze.

What have been some of your other favorite projects to work on, and how did they change your perception of what you can accomplish through illustration? O perigo da semente (“The Danger of the Seed”) is one of the books I’ve enjoyed working on the most so far. I had complete creative freedom and plenty of time, which allowed me to dive deeply into experimenting with techniques I wasn’t used to. This project confirmed for me that a deep immersion in the process over a generous period of time is necessary to achieve results that the fast pace of the industry doesn’t allow. The illustrations from O perigo da semente were selected for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Exhibition in 2022.

What other illustrators do you admire, and what in their work speaks to you? I’m a big fan of Laura Teixeira’s work. She was my teacher, and I have enormous admiration for how she creates images by exploring different materials, from sticker dots to colorful adhesive tapes. I love the idea of using nontraditional materials to create illustrations. I’m also very drawn to artists who take the creative process seriously, those guided by curiosity and experimentation—almost as if everything were a scientific experiment.

What excites you about illustration right now, and where do you think the industry is going? Considering the growing use of AI, I’m thinking about counterbalancing that by continuing to deepen my immersion in manual processes and experimentation. I’m not very optimistic about the industry; AI really undermines a market that was already quite fragile, at least here in Brazil. If we lose our deep relationship with the creative process and delegate that work to AI, our cognition will likely become increasingly atrophied. Our ability to imagine will weaken, and images will become more and more homogenized—as they already have been for some time.

Do you have any advice for illustrators just starting their careers today? Try not to post everything you make. Many times, we end up creating something to get likes and please the algorithms instead of spending time creating solely for ourselves, with no intention of reaching any particular goal. If you know you’re going to post it afterward, it becomes harder to allow yourself to make mistakes. Social media creates anxiety about doing everything really well, even if it’s your first time experimenting with a material. Give yourself permission to create something just for you, without showing it to anyone. ca