Iberanime Poster

A clash between Portugal and Japan

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

Very recently I mentioned I drew a couple of covers and a poster for a convention. Unlike in most cases, the poster was revealed almost immediately after its completion, which is very pleasing (sometimes you wait months/years for stuff to come out). And this is what it looks like:

So exactly what is this convention and did we get to this image?

Let’s dive in!

Iberanime

Iberanime is a festival about all things Japanese, particularly focused on popular culture and entertainment. A convention full of cosplay, anime, manga, video-games, J-Pop, the whole thing.

I’ve been to a couple as guest and now they’ve invited me to draw their poster, which proved irresistible.

The overall briefing was all about mixing Portuguese and Japanese culture in some way, with this year’s premise focusing on a kind of parade. Being that the location for 2025 is Santarém, a beautiful city not far from Lisbon, I first thought of doing an overview of Santarém’s skyline and a big traditional Japanese dragon flying through, with a bunch of famous characters on its back.

But as I went through many reference photos I realized that the characters would end up being too tiny or covering too much of the city for any of it to be recognizable. With that in mind, I decided for the opposite and got the camera pretty much on the ground, pointing at one of the most famous monuments in town (St. Francis Monastery). After finding the right reference picture, I put this together:

Front and center are two original characters, a girl and a boy, leading a parade filled with some of the most famous anime/manga/videogame characters of the last few decades. You’ve got Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, Zelda, Persona, Final Fantasy VII, Sailor Moon (the cat), My Hero Academia, Totoro, Gundam, Evangelion, Nausicaa.

I felt strongly about this proposal as it featured everything asked for in a very clear way. The characters were big, varied and easily recognizable, presenting Japanese culture beyond any doubts. The monastery filled the background and we even have St. Francis statue in the mix, clearly showcasing Santarém. Everyone is in synch in this big party parade and I even gave Naruto a Portuguese and a Japanese flag to bring it all together. To my delight, everyone from the convention side felt equally good about it.

I immediately began working on the final piece, pencilling it with a bit more detail than usual to make sure I locked in all the different characters and the background.

Then the usual traditional inks + digital tones (using 3 different shades for foreground, mid ground and background:

Finally, Chris O’Halloran came in to put it all together with his lovely colors. We went for brighter colors and less (or none) textures than usual to make it as anime as possible within our style. After getting them from Chris I still added the white fluffy clouds for that classic anime sky we all love:

I don’t do much fan art, so above all this poster was an excellent excuse to draw a bunch of stuff that I either never drew or haven’t drawn since I was a teenager.

It also gave me the urge to draw more of my favorites. Maybe I will…

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Meanwhile, on Project Red I spent the entire week inking and I managed to get some writing done for a non-comics project. I was having trouble trying to find time to do that so I forcefully allocated 30 minutes after lunch. Sometimes you gotta do it like that, otherwise you’ll never start it.

Once it starts rolling, it gets much easier.

See you all next week!

André