An ink and watercolor drawing of a man with long black hair wearing brown overalls and a white t-shirt and reading on a patch of grass.

ABOUT the ARTIST

Felipe Álvarez de Toledo López Herrera is a Spanish-Argentine illustrator, cartoonist and graphic facilitator based in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. He's had an itinerant life, and after a lifetime of starting afresh, drawing helps him connect the dots.

Felipe is passionate about the narrative power of images and illustration's explosive graphic potential. As a trained art historian (Ph.D., Duke '22) he approaches each project with a mental archive of images that dialogue with his own work. Training as a graphic facilitator is teaching me to love spontenaity and real-time creation, and to think deeply about what needs to be included in an image for it to communicate.

MATERIALS

I am a bit promiscuous with my supplies. For quick cartoons and on-the-go sketching, I have many fountain pens that I will use sporadically, but my go-tos are a Pilot Namiki Falcon with a soft extra fine nib, or a Kuretake 40 brush pen. De Atramentis document ink is *wonderful* for fountain pens. For larger paintings at home, a dip pen with Kuretake G nib, or a brush. I also love microns, but I hate to toss them and generate waste.

Watercolor: Winsor and Newton travel set, usually with a water brush pen.

Paper: Smooth bristol for inking, hot-press watercolor paper for painting.I also love to experiment with new materials and techniques, so who knows what I might be using now. I also play with gouache, colored pencils, chalk pastels.

For analog graphic facilitation work, I use board/paper and markers (Neuland, preferably). I also can work on whiteboards.

For digital graphic facilitation work, I use an iPad, Apple Pencil and Adobe Fresco, which allows me to work with scalable vector graphics. For other digital illustration, I also use photoshop and a Cintiq tablet.