Catalina Estrada is a graphic designer and illustrator. She was born and raised in Medellin, Colombia. There she studied graphic design before moving to Barcelona, where she has been living for the past 7 years.
Estrada’s artwork brings all the colors and power of Latin-American folklore and refines it with a subtle touch of European sophistication. Her ability for creating fascinating illusive worlds, full of colors, nature, and enchanting characters, bursts in all of her works: art, graphic design and illustration.
Her work has been featured by Communication Arts and Computer Arts magazines, Die Gestalten Verlag, Swindle, DPI, Ppaper and Graphic Magazine. Some of her clients include: Paul Smith, Coca-Cola, Nike, Honda, Custo-Barcelona, Salomon, Chronicle Books, among many others. She currently works freelance and also teaches illustration at IDEP (graphic design school in Barcelona).
Follow the jump to read an interesting interview with Catalina, along with more of her stunning imagery.
How long have you been drawing and did it take long to find your personal style?
I was basicly doing lots of graphic design when I finished my studies, however when I started volunteering for the help fundations in Colombia I started doing lots of illustration and liking it more and more, I started developing my own graphic language and this alowded me to get more illustration commissions. I did lots of flyers for Dj's, disco's and bars and this also allowed me to do lot of illustration work.
I've always loved drawing and painting and with illustration I sort of found a way to combine both graphic design with art. I've always loved colour, I've always loved emotional images, so I guess I put lots of both emotion and colour into every image I create. Some years ago I started doing some volunteer work for foundations in Colombia helping kids with AIDS and kids in Colombia’s countryside.
The illustrations I created for them were sort of the beginning of this style I guess, I tried to put lots of colour, love, hope, lots of light in them so that they would really get people's attention. They worked great so I was really happy with the results. Those were very inspirational projects, and it was sort of the beginning of my illustration career.
Your work has been featured in many exhibitions. Can you tell us a little bit on how that got started and what it means to you?
Once I was that happy with my illustrations for the volunteer works for Colombia I started sending them to different publishing houses, blogs, magazines etc, and tried to get some sort of self promotion by publishing them. Ten they started to get published gradually. Also my web page helped a lot since people could check out the rest of my work there.
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