In a relaxed talk at NAD Design Café, António Valjean, YDreams’ illustrator and concept artist, talked about illustration techniques, technology and learning methods.  

The american culture is present in the illustrator work mainly in the Comics field, through influences “to which is difficult to escape, such as Marvel”. In this area, the author works in personal and commercial projects, in processes that he considers “very hard” and could be compared to a movie production. “Comics are all about cinema, they're like a storyboard”, he said.

Also related to cinema are some of Valjean’s latest works with YDreams, which involve also the production of interactive videogames. Before each session, the viewer can participate in “basic and intuitive” games using only his hands, whose movement is captured by a sensor. Valjean presents it as an “alternative to the traditional advertisement” that will make the audience “memorize the brand more easily”.

The illustrator briefly talked about Magicbook, also developed in YDreams, that consists in an interactive screen that has not only the function to foil as a traditional book, but also to put animation inside an electronic book. This is a project “like IPad”, the illustrator explains, “but we invented it first”. This is a point that he reinforces: “Regardless of what many people think, Portugal is in the top in this kind of technologies”. 

Besides his artistic production, mainly in the advertisement and marketing fields, the scientific illustration is the type of work that causes more trouble to the author. This is because “it is mainly based in photos”, that many times bring other problems “because the colors are not reliable or because they were taken very far away”.  Problems that Valjean surpasses by “making sketches of the animal from different angles” and also with field work.

In all of his works, Valjean prefers to do “all the illustration process digitally, from the sketch to the coloration”, but he doesn’t exclude “a first sketch in paper, that is sometimes necessary”.

... And to all the designers he left an advice: “always work thinking in reaching the sky, because the developers, if that’s the case, will bring you to earth”.