My new automated email workflow allows me to be more efficient and reduce the stress caused by the number of emails I receive every day.

How I keep my personal and business finances separate as a freelance illustrator. An automated system using different bank accounts.

There are several techniques for creating animations of characters and other graphics. These methods can be combined or used individually depending on the desired result.
Choosing a right animation technique for each situation allows us to work efficiently and achieve better results.

In this article, I describe the ones we use to create our animations.

As a conceptual illustrator, I work with ideas. Finding an idea is a very intuitive process and sometimes unpredictable.

Tracking our business expenses is as important as tracking our incomes. Uncontrolled expenses can quickly ruin our earnings. I use a spreadsheet to track my business expenses.

That’s the second article of the series where I share my journey switching from Photoshop to Illustrator for creating my illustrations.

After the first weeks working on Illustrator, I realised that I was still tied up to Photoshop to develop the sketches. I’m not up to sketch using Illustrator directly because I prefer to draw. I found that drawing was my natural way of bringing ideas to the reality. Illustrator is not related to drawing, but more to composing using Shapes, the Pathfinder and the Pen tool.

My previous workflow consisted of sketching in a notebook using a pencil and then creating the final sketch from scratch in Photoshop using a Wacom Cintiq 13HD.

As I switched from Photoshop to Illustrator, I thought it was a nice opportunity also to question my sketching process and a good chance to improve the whole workflow.

Since I became a professional illustrator, I always used Photoshop as my main drawing app. I developed a solid workflow in Photoshop that allowed me to work for newspapers where you need to work very fast and be effective.

Last year, I started to work with Jose on animations. It required vector illustrations and that changed everything.

That’s the first article of the series where I share my journey switching from Photoshop to Illustrator for creating my illustrations. I will share with you the whole process, including the reasons, the challenges I faced and also how I feel about it.

A bad composition can ruin a good image and idea. To help me in this process, I use my particular version of the rule of thirds.

I share with you the Photoshop Actions I use every day. You can download and adapt them to your own needs.

Every day, we have to complete lots of tasks. And since it’s the beginning of the year, many of us have set up some goals we want to achieve.
In most cases, nobody has taught us how to stay organised and we ended up finding our own solutions.

We trust our overloaded brains will remember all the tasks and deadlines, and because our brains are busy enough being creatives, solving problems and remembering more important things, we usually forget things.

Over the years, I’ve been studying and implementing different productivity systems, including sophisticated approaches like GTD and simple ones like writing down my tasks on paper.
After a lot of trial and error, I found a very simple system that works great for me and helps me to be productive and having everything under control.