We caught up with Rodrigo earlier this week, making waves in the NFT art scene, with his unique quirky artwork. Discover how he got into the scene:
Rodrigo, thank you for taking the time to do this interview with us.
Your work looks incredible, my personal favourite is “Fake News”. How did you first get into creating digital art?
Thank you Liam, ‘Fake News’ is one of my favourites too. Well …I was around 10 years old when I got my first PC. I remember re-creating the Saint Seiya (my favourite anime when I was little) characters and their sets of armors on Microsoft Paint, pixel art at its finest 😆. That was my first contact with digital art.
What are your inspirations? This could be artists (NFT or non-NFTs), TV shows, music, or any random thing on the internet!
I love characters, always did. My inspirations started as a mix of my old toys, Brazilian cartoon zines, comic books and evolved into surrealist paintings, fine art sculptures (specially South American and Asian sculptures) and real life observation of people. I think I enjoy creating round characters with small hands because they remind me of my mom and my dad somehow. I’m amazed by how unique we all are and I really like to depict that quirkiness to my sculptures and drawings. Humans are funny.
How did you come up with your specific style?
I think it is the result of decades of experimenting with character creation. Regular anatomy is boring to me. Although these fundamentals are important, I just like to start with a line and let the rest happen randomly, finding cool shapes and happy accidents during the process. I like to find a balance between imperfect organic forms with the perfection of geometric shapes. Lately (last 6 years) I’ve been playing with 3D softwares and I’ve been using this knowledge to create odd digital sculptures that turned out to be my specific style at the moment.
What is your work process from idea to finish?
it depends. I believe I have two work modes: random creation and concept creation. When it is random, I just let whatever comes to my mind fill the screen with lines and evolve from there (as mentioned in the previous question). But the concept creation always starts with an idea, some thought that I have about anything, usually regarding our modern culture and behaviour. Once I have the idea, different images start to appear in my mind until I stick with the one that will depict the concept well. After that, I do a very quick sketch by hand and with that simple base reference I start to block the sculpture in Zbrush. Then it is all about refining the shapes and experimenting with colors, once I’m happy with it I bring it to Keyshot to animate and create the final render.
Cryptocurrencies and NFT have been dominating the world news for the past year thanks to the meteoric rise of Bitcoin, Cryptopunks, and of course, the famous Beeple $69M NFT purchase. What are your honest thoughts on the cryptocurrency and NFT space right now?
I’m in crypto now because of NFTs, I’m a total noob and I’m trying to learn everything I can about it in the past months. The idea of decentralized finance is fascinating to me, I’m a believer that crypto will be our mainstream currency in the future. The nft space has the potential to be much bigger than what it is now. To be completely honest, all these collectibles projects being released every day made me feel the greed that permeates the space. Everybody wants to get rich fast, flipping the hottest trend or selling whatever 10k generative art. I don’t believe this is sustainable and it is in the way of potential new use cases for the creative industry. It works great with art but the technology can and will change every industry in my opinion. But for now, I’m just happy that digital art can be valued and I hope to grow more in the space, expressing my true and raw art that was in my back pocket for years since I was mainly working for brands in my design career. NFTs and crypto made me dream again, those huge dreams that you have as a kid when everything seems possible. I feel I’m being part of a digital art Renaissance and I’m really excited for the future.
What are your other passions besides creating art?
I love tabletop RPG games. I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons consistently for 5 years now. I love music, sometimes I like to grab my guitar to play some Nirvana and remember the time I had a band. And the most important, I love being around my loved ones, to party and celebrate life, but living in a foreign country during the pandemic is not helping with that.
This is something we ask new starters in CoinBurp as part of their Q&A interviews that we post on our blog, but the answers are always great so we’ll ask you too; What TV show or movie are you ashamed to admit you love?
Recently I watched The Circle on Netflix. Loved it but I am ashamed to admit it. Give me a break! We are all struggling in this pandemic and sometimes, on a hangover Sunday, all you need is fatty food and something dumb to watch.
Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions for us. The CoinBurp team can’t wait to see you grow as an artist!
Thank you Liam! I really appreciate the space and the opportunity to share my thoughts with you.
Post some links to where people can find your artwork and social media accounts. Also, feel free to shout out anything else you wish.
You can find all my links here :https://linktr.ee/rwr2
