February 2003 Newton Florentino
I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. From the time I could hold a pencil in my hands, I've been scribbling on any piece of paper I could find. I
do the same today, but on a digitalized tablet.
In my twenties I started working as a commercial illustrator for advertising agencies. At that time we used tempera (Gouache) and
pastels. You can imagine me at my desk with many brushes, water, tubes of paint all over the place, mixing the colors and doing something like 6 color advertising layouts a day! It was a lot of work!
I was never satisfied with the ordinary and I always tried to improve my work by buying books of the
master painters to learn new (old) techniques.
I moved to New York in 1979. I now live in Queens Bayside. When I first arrived, I started looking for a job doing layout "comps", and
showed my portfolio around. While the art directors loved my portfolio, they told me that in New York, comps were done using Magic Markers (felt tip colored pens).
In my thirties, to stay in the business I learned how to illustrate with this new tool, how to blend one color into another, the best kinds
of paper for using markers without bleeding, how to keep the illustration crisp, and not overwork it.
For the next couple of months I was learning and redoing my portfolio using the new media. I mastered the medium and after one year I
was giving classes on how to illustrate with magic markers!
I used to do the whole comp by hand from the illustration to the lettering. But after 1988 the art directors told me just to do the
illustration, the layout will be done on the computer. After that I decided to make the transition to computer aided illustration.
I learned to use FreeHand, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
For many years, I was doing beautiful Illustrations using these programs. But I wasn't totally happy with the way I had to work to achieve certain effects and I would often have to jump from one program to another.
Then in 2000 while surfing the Internet I found XARA X. I don't have to tell you how happy that discovery made me. Now I do everything from
the sketch to the final illustration in Xara. It gives me all the tools I need to complete the whole job.
I'm still using the Magic Markers today for my initial sketch before I do the finish on the computer.
Newton
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