Artist Profile | Cartoon & Caricature

Tiago Hoisel

“I have a degree in Graphic Design, but even before starting university, I was already directing my studies for humorous illustrations, especially for cartoons. During college my course didn't change and I continued to focus on humorous illustrations rather than graphic design itself. Thanks to that approach, my career turned naturally towards the field of illustrations. Little by little my personal work began to have an identity and began to gain projection as it became a professional work. I grew up in Ilheus, a small city on the Brazilian coast, about 400 km from Salvador. During my childhood I used to do many things like playing football, fishing, raising fish and crabs and I also loved to draw. When I was 14 years old, I discovered the world of cartooning through the work of a cartoonist named “Ique”, who published his work in “Veja”, which is the magazine with the largest circulation in Brazil. I really loved cartoons and from there I started drawing every day. I started by copying Ique's cartoons and little by little I got to know other references and developed my own style. When I started studying Graphic Design, I still had no idea that I would one day make a living as a professional illustrator. I have drawn simply because I liked it too much. Curiously, 10 years after my first contact with the Iques cartoons in the magazine "Veja", I was invited by the same magazine to publish my work there. I have always been fascinated by realism and volumetry in painting. Since I started drawing, the focus of my studies has been to understand the behavior of light and different materials. At first my work was done only in graphite and I limited it as an attempt to reproduce the volumes of photography in greyscale. I spent about four years working that way, until I found that my perception was good enough to start working with colors. At that time I did my first experiments with pastels, colored pencils and watercolors. Still at the beginning of my studies with these techniques, I discovered Photoshop. I ended up dedicating myself exclusively to it because in addition to the fact that conventional materials are expensive, with Photoshop I could use the drawing and shading that I had developed with graphite and just work the colors. Little by little I was simplifying the base of the pencil and working more and more with this program, until I did my first work entirely in Photoshop. The time I bought my first tablet was when I completely finished my migration to Photoshop and I'm still doing my work entirely on the computer, from drafts to finish. It is difficult to specify how long a job takes to complete. That largely depends on the complexity of the illustration and the degree of finish. As an average time, I ask for two to three weeks for illustrations like ´Big Bad Wolf´, ´Teenboy´ or ´Lunch Time´”.