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3D Total : Have you ever been abroad and been inspired to represent scenes in various parts of the world where the light differs completely?
Juan : Unfortunately I have not travelled a lot and have just visited some European countries like Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Italy besides my dear Spain and it is true that there is something in the light that makes a difference. I still have not represented many scenes from beyond my country, only the last one which is called “Looking up in Venezia”, but I have thought of enlarging my frontiers a little to try to capture the peculiar colours of each place with the biggest fidelity.
3DTotal : One of your most recent images represents a room with numerous clues and traces about its inhabitant. Could you explain a little about the inspiration behind it and what prompted its creation?
Juan : It is very possible that the inhabitant of that house is myself because many of those hints are fragments of my own life. The tape-recorder in the window is an exact reproduction of the first device that I had in my life to listen music. I sat down at a table like that listening to artists or groups of the 70´s; for example Kate Bush whose picture you can see next to the window, and whilst I wrote in a notebook like the one that is sitting on the table.Many of the books in the scene make reference to periods of my life, for
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example the names of the groups in which I have played. We see an empty ashtray because I used to smoke a lot but I gave it up 9 years ago.
Pictures of John Lennon, Pat Metheny, Magic Johnson, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Camus and Kubrik, books of CG, the boat of beer, the recipient with coins and the dartboard just reflect some of my likings or weaknesses and the telephone is a technological symbol of communication. The bolt of the door symbolizes my necessity to have an impassable space which is only mine. I need to live in a family but with the possibility of isolation as well; I am a very sociable man but I need a good daily dose of solitude to work correctly.
3DTotal : Can you give our readers an insight into how you go about texturing your scenes?
Juan : First off I worry about unwrapping the UV’s as best as possible since this task can facilitate the texturing phase a lot. Then I generate a greyscale map with information of holes and protrusions in the dirtmap or ambient occlusion style.
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Then I use texture baking to be able to
edit it by hand in Photoshop. On the
other hand I also combine in multiple layers different dirt maps taken out of old walls those that I edit with different tools and filters. I overlay photographic
textures that I get in the street with a
digital camera and lastly I paint the
cracks of the walls, the graffiti, etc. by hand. I believe that it is very important to work the textures with a graphic tablet, because it also improves your drawing skills.
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3DTotal : Aside from improving ones drawing skills, do you feel it is necessary to add in some hand painted elements such as graffiti so that the scene is not made up entirely of photographs?
Juan :
I would not say that it is necessary but it is one more element that can solve a composition problem, to help provide some of the building history or to fill an empty wall.Each artist has their resources and in my case I use it to solve the kind
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of aesthetic problems by hand. I find it simple to paint a crack rather than to find it in a picture collection. I believe that the artist has to manage as many elements as possible in the scene.
3DTotal : Do you think there is any relationship between your traditional work and your CG work apart from the subject matter or do you treat them as two very separate pursuits?
Juan : My education in painting has helped me a lot in my career in 3D because ultimately colour is colour and shape is shape regardless of which technique you use. I consider myself an artist and the fact of having dedicated myself to 3D or to music is purely casual. I could have dedicated myself to dance, photography or literature and with a minimum of technical skill I could have developed a similar quality. My painter years made me think a lot about the beauty of my environment and made me observe nature around me and to analyze it and then to filter it across my own aesthetic sense. I learned that the most important thing is not to represent reality but to represent myself through reality; the artist doesn’t discover the beauty of life and put it in his work, but rather transforms the disorder of life into Art and switching the environment that surrounds him for an order. For now, what we obtain in CG is a two-dimensional image maybe in motion, maybe not, but at least colours, shapes and a history of 2D space are exactly the same as the traditional painting, cinema or photography. It is possible that in the future we will build our own language in some way still unimaginable for us and, of course, closely bound to the technology and the Art.
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