Experience

• Freelance artist and Illustrator at Freelance - Just me - "I Create Worlds".net

  Portimao, Portugal

  January 1995 - Present

  In between my other regular in-house jobs, I´ve always done a lot of freelance illustration work for other clients. Particularly since the internet appeared and the opportunities started to be more widely available for a freelance type of lifestyle, I gradually moved into fulltime illustration and concept art, which is what I´m doing right now. I´ve been doing it full time since about 2008 or so and I´ve done a lot of children book illustration particularly for the Portuguese children book market, but also for abroad. Worked on board games, card games, children books, school books, posters, t-shirts, you name it.
  
  Got back to animation a bit too; created a couple of 3D animation bits for a Portuguese TV documentaries, and done a lot of similar work for educational software, particularly for a very sucessfull portuguese product called "Afonsinho Explica" where I was a freelance art concept artist for about a year too.
  
  So right now, after so many children books, I´m more focused on what i love to do best, which is concept art, particularly backgrounds and scenery work. I continue to work on childrens books , but my plan is to gradually move into some concept art or background scenery jobs out there and this is why I´ve also joined Artstation.

  Although I started as a traditional artist, (love watercolors and real acrylics) I gradually moved into digital a couple years ago for practical and commercial reasons which have to do mostly with speed of production. Currently I do all my work in Art-Rage and Photoshop and I paint my art using the Cintiq alternative tablet Huion GT-220, connected to my IMac which is a set up the I love and gives me much freedom to create.
  
  I still do traditional art, as sometimes I have clients that preffer the old school methods and so right now I think i´m in the middle of both worlds and I guess i also do digital but with traditional technics in mind and I never think of my paintings as completely digital because I paint them all with my traditional fundamentals in mind all the time.
  

• Webdesigner - Graphic Designer at Portugal Info

  Portimao, Portugal

  January 2006 - January 2008

  For a while I went back to webdesign when I was hired by this now extinct Portuguese touristic promotion web company. Fun times, great crew to work with and essentially I did a lot of graphic design work for them related to Tourism and local region promotion, etc.
  

• Software Designer - Graphic Designer - Art Director at Profitus / Ebase Software

  Portimao, Portugal

  January 1996 - January 2006

  After the "Gambys" project, although the game was very successful the company was converted into an Hospitality Software development Software House, as it would bring back more immediate income. So for about ten years I´ve worked in software design for this company and did about ten or more software layouts, graphics and overall design for their products. One of my softwares got the Microsoft Award back in 1999 for best design in a Touchscreen. It´s a software called "Restus 2000" which is still going strong this day here in Portugal, Spain, and other countries.
  

• Art Director - Concept artist at Portidata - Viagem Software

  Portimao, Portugal

  January 1992 - January 1995

  Back in the early 90s, I was hired as an art director by this software company which had just created a -Game- branch and the goal at the time, (remember this was before the Internet), was to create the first professionally produced Portuguese PC-Videogame.
  
  I worked on that for about three years and the "Gambys" game was released in Portugal and Spain on Xmas of 1995. Unfortunely we were ahead of our time, Portugal was isolated and so after "Gambys", even though the game was very sucessful and got excellent reviews all over, the owners of the company converted it into a bussiness software company after completing this first game and we stopped creating games. It was incredibly expensive at the time for an independent Portuguese company to pay salaries for one year or more to a game development team and so the decision was to go into hospitality software after that which made more imediate proffit.

  Nevertheless for three years I was the Art Director for this company, created a ton of concept art illustrations for the game, design the gamby characters, did a lot of sprite animation and 3D studio (v.2.0 in Dos) work while managing a small creative team during game production in-house locally here in the south of Portugal.
  
  http://icreateworlds.net/gambys-retro-videogame/