Artist Draws Obscure But Adorable Creatures From Hundreds Of Hatched Line

According to Luis Coelho: “A few years ago, I felt the need to get back to drawing after a long creative break. I’ve decided to explore the first materials with which I had contact when I was a child, and so I started using pens again. In that process, I discovered that I actually can have lots of fun and peace of mind by spending hours and hours drawing little lines to create characters.

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Then, I gave my two nieces a blank sheet and told them that they would have to decide what animals should appear on those white papers. I also told that those animals would be the guardians of their dreams and whenever they needed to get out of a nightmare they just needed to call them. Back then I was trying to give something that could potentially help them start enjoying the wonders of lucid dreaming.

What I didn’t know at that moment was that those two drawings marked the very beginning of the style that I’m working on today. I was already making thousands of lines on all of my creations but given the deal I wanted those creatures to breed sweetness. It felt so good and I had so much fun that I ended up focusing my work on animal interpretations for children (or grown-ups that still feed their inner child). Maybe because it started this way, I feel like all my creatures seem to have come out of a dream world, somewhat obscure but also adorable.

Lately, I’ve been drawing mostly cats and some dogs under the request of those that have decided to follow my work on Instagram (they are also naming all of my creatures). The first cat I drew when I was already exploring this hatching technique was just because my brother-in-law had told me so many times to draw cats that I ended up drawing one. When I posted it on Instagram, I noticed an unusual amount of excitement around that drawing and it motivated me to draw more of them. I ended up finding cats to be extremely fun to draw allowing so many possibilities of interpretation.

One thing that I believe to be important about my art is that I never know exactly how a drawing will end. I tend to trust and embrace all possible “mistakes” that appear during the process and let them guide me till the end. This is something that I first discovered when I was painting abstract many years ago just for the sake of creativity (I’ve only very recently become a professional artist). I really like to zone out while I’m drawing these creatures just as much as I used to do with abstract painting, the only differences are that it is way slower, there are no colors and I do it inside previously defined shapes.

Now I’m a full-time illustrator because the Internet can be a wonderful thing! Social media allows me to share my creations with the world and I’m lucky that some beautiful people have decided to follow my work and support what I do.”