Marina Manzano

 Hello everyone!!  It's hard to find the moment to sit down and write, it's faster to upload a picture in social media and just keep going with all the daily work. (in case you don't follow me you can find me under @cuquetafera ) My girls are doing great, they are the sweetest things, but being a mom and an entrepreneur is very tiring and I am very tired at the end of the day.  Luckily I have a lot of work, I was worried because during the pandemic and in 2021 it didn't went like before and over that, there is all the problems with the suppliers and the stock shortage of some items and I was quite worried but just 3 months ago everything changed and I've never worked that hard. I hope in the future it will be easier to organize because we have moved next to the atelier, so now I just have to learn to stop working when it's time to stop... and it's not easy because lately there is always something to do.  There are some news since my last post but as I'm

These past years have been kind of weird... as time stopped and during this hiatus I also stopped somehow. I did work and I did plan new projects but my day to day with the kids was everything I was doing and all the other just slowed down.  As soon as lockdowns stopped and I could work full time again in my screen printing and customization little company of one, I've been spending too many hours taking every order I could and even so it's not working as good as I hoped. Now that the girls go to school and spend the day there, I am planning some new projects such as an online shop with digital and physical items, collaborations with other freelancers and even a full sustainable clothing line for kids. I'm putting a lot of thought in how to reactivate my little company and make it viable for the years to come. (If I could, I would pay a consultor to help me with all of this...) Side hustle: Some of you have already noticed that before summer I started endorsing a natural co

Hello! Here is an update that I hope is the first post of many more!  Some of you know that I had my girl after years of infertility treatment, 7 to be exact, and we were extremely happy to welcome Nausicaa in 2018.  Since then I have been painting and drawing but in a different way, I work more on commissions and I can't post any picture of them and I have little time to spend drawing.  2019, when the world was still as it was, I could do a small exhibition and it made me very happy, I was also pregnant again and I had to live through the last half of it alone, at home, in lockdown. I know a lot of people were very creative but I was tired and down, I felt sorry for Nausicaa who couldn't go to school or play with friends and on July I gave birth to Hermione.  So, I have been VERY busy... 2020 was wild and I had to think in new ways to make and use my art. Our journey to be parents has taken 10 years and we can finally move on (not that we stopped, you know what I mean). I have

Some illustrations I've been working on the past months. I realized that I don't have the time to work traditionally anymore, not with a baby at home and my day job (even being self employed) doesn't allow me do it either. This means I have been focusing in improving my digital skills using an iPad Pro and the apple pencil. The building were first sketched in paper and scanned: Some commissions:  And some season illustrations:  Thank you for stopping by!

It’s been more than a year since I last wrote here. Nothing important happened, well, yes, I had a baby girl named Nausicaa, but I meant that nothing important happened in my illustration career. I attach a picture of her at the end. I have been drawing, practicing, trying new things, playing around but I see that, now, more than ever, I need a personal project because I feel I am the eternal student.  I want to be a children’s book illustrator but I keep trying new tools and new software and new apps and at the end I get this feeling that if I had invested all this time drawing in one single technique I’d have achieved something by now. (Maybe not, maybe I’d have decided that a project is too boring all the time the same and I’d have decided that I need to study something else...) 🤷‍♀️ who knows... So... I have been working in my site and I have to make some beautiful new art for it ( http://marinamanzano.com )  I have also created a new instagram profile for my illustrations and cre

Here are some things I have learnt trying to build the "ultimate portfolio":   There are thousands of sites which have tutorials or advice about building your portfolio and how it has to look like and what kind of work you should put in it. I have watch infinite videos and read infinite articles and at the end, there is not a magic recipe to build a great portfolio. Here are my conclusions, I hope this can help: - Your portfolio is nothing else than your "art resumé", this means that it has to be adapted every time you want to send an appication for a job. - There are as many portfolios as companies or specific jobs. - Decide first where you want to send an aplication and then research what kind of portfolios they like. Nowadays most of professional artists share their experiences and how they work and what they like in social media. Follow them. - Your portfolio is like sharing a little bit of your persona too, not only your art. If you like craft