How cool would it be to travel around the world and have little cute monsters with you? Illustrator Ruben Cantuni's (@tokyocandies) passion for character design and traveling lead him to his project "Around Another World". A personal project where he take some photos from his trips and add his personal touch - character design.
One of my biggest interests is traveling and I've had the opportunity to visit some places during the last few years. All the photos in this project are taken by me with various cameras or with iPhone(s). Then last year I found this great mobile app for iPad called Procreate, which is really awesome, and I started doodling around with that, until I had the idea to use it to add characters on my travel photos. That was totally unusual to me, because I almost never used photos in my work (just in one project, which was basically the same thing, but with a slightly different style) and I usually work 100% in vectors, while this is a more "painted" style.
-Rubens Cantuni
There's no particular meaning behind each illustration. I just choose a picture that I think might be good for this, look at it for a while and consider various character options and then I just draw it. An awesome feature of Procreate is that the app records the entire drawing process and you can export a timelapse video.
-Rubens Cantuni
I don't know how to describe my style, honestly I've never been able to give "tags" to it. It's not really necessary, people will think what they want about it, and that's what the style is for them. I have many inspiration sources, the early work of Akira Toriyama, specially Dr. Slump & Arale, has been surely one of my main influences for character design. Then street art, pop art, tattoos, videogames, movies...
-Rubens Cantuni
My advice to young artists is to "Find your own way. That's it."
-Rubens Cantuni
See the whole project here.
About Rubens Cantuni
Rubens Cantuni was born in Genova, Italy, in 1982. Currently he's living in Los Angeles, working as art director in a digital entertainment studio. He studied industrial design, but he has always worked in advertising, until recently when he stepped into educational digital products for kids. His career as an illustrator has always been a sort of side project, Rubens has been freelancing full time just for very short periods of time. But he's been able to exhibit in collective shows around the world as well as getting featured on magazines and books here and there. See more of his works on Behance, Instagram, Tumblr or his website.