Carlos Lerma was commissioned by NeonMob (The world’s premiere social marketplace for digital trading cards and collectibles. They make selling, collecting, trading, and enjoying digital art, trading cards, and animations accessible to anyone. Over 6 million digital collectibles reside in the collections of members hailing from 180+ countries.) to create more than 145 portraits of the most popular NFL Players today.

They gave me the list of players and references. I'm not actually really familiar with the NFL, but it was a really fun project, even though it was intense. Those were a lot of portraits. We decided to make them pop out and work both as individual art pieces and as a whole group. The most obvious inspiration was old-school trading cards, but brought to a modern style.
-Carlos Lerma

This is tough to answer! I can't say so for myself, but I've heard people mention that my style has a good balance between cartoonish-ness, abstract style and composition and likeness. I try to do my best.
-Carlos Lerma

My style is based on my limitations! I find it very hard to do realism and painterly or detailed stuff, so I focus on abstraction, geometry and composition. My inspiration depends on the job, so for this one I was inspired by the players themselves. If you mean influence, I believe the strongest influences on my style come from cubism and futurism and illustrators like Patricio Betteo, Pablo Lobato and César Moreno.
-Carlos Lerma

Keep doing stuff. You don't have to be looking for a style, just keep working and being yourself and your style will come to you, little by little. I know it's a cliché, but the only piece of advice that I know works for everything is 'don't stop practicing'.
-Carlos Lerma

About Carlos Lerma

Carlos Lerma is an illustrator and graphic designer from Tijuana, México currently living in Cancún. Aside from his professional illustration work (editorial, advertising, product, etc.) He does a lot of personal self-promo work and fan-art because he loves being a fan of things! See more of his works on Behance or his website.