My name is Carlos, I'm 35 years old, Brazilian, with a degree in Design. Unlike most, my contact with art was minimal in childhood, only school art education classes, which for the most part, only served for children to have fun, with no intention of learning about art.
But I always liked art, I really liked movies, it was my biggest artistic source, since, unlike most of my friends, I didn't have a video game, nor access to comic books, but when I had the opportunity to play at friends, my eyes sparkled, but that was all.
And it was like that until I was 15 years old, when I met a friend who liked graffiti, and I started to play with graffiti, only in the notebook and shirts, using only bic pen, I used a spray can only once, to paint my uniform. The following year I changed schools, and I no longer had contact with this friend and with drawing. Even though I really enjoyed drawing and had this little contact with art, I just stopped.
As a teenager, I always worked in the family business, the focus was on me to take charge, but this idea did not motivate me. I remember that in 2002 I was with my parents in the living room, and they were watching the soap opera Esperança, where the actor Reynaldo Gianecchini, was a sculptor, and he made the sculpture of his beloved, and I thought that was beautiful, and I remember listening to my parents saying, “Beautiful! Whoever does this is a gift.”
And in that moment I felt a feeling that I could do this, that this is what I should do, it's hard to explain, but it would be like when people try to explain love at first sight. But having access to art was almost impossible, at most a paper and a pencil. But as I said before, I was shaped to take the reins of the company, and then came the entrance exam, and it should be something that could be used in the company. I spent 2 years doing preparatory because the focus was to study engineering at Unesp, a university in that neighboring city where I live.
Even though I knew it wasn't what I wanted, I didn't know what I really wanted, so I got carried away, to the point where I ended up going to a private college in production engineering at 19. After 2 years of engineering, I couldn't take it anymore, and I decided to leave the course, however, during college, I really liked technical drawing and CAD.
In college I learned Autodesk Inventor. But dropping out of college was complicated, how could I tell my parents about it? All the money and time invested, but there was no other way, I took courage and talked to them. To relieve, I decided to take some technical courses and improve myself more in CAD. I took a year and a half of courses at Senai, where I learned technical drawing, basic mechanics, machining, autocad and solidworks, and had the opportunity to teach at Senai itself, in 2007, when I was 22 years old.
But my parents demanded that I go to college, however, I wanted to do something that involved 3D, and had something more artistic, that's when I bought a book on professions, the one that I was pre-university in mid-2007, because I wanted to see where I fit in. best. And it was at that moment that I met the design faculty. For me, it was the perfect choice, as it had the projects part that interested my parents, but it also had the artistic part that interested me.
And the area of design that caught my attention at the time was the automotive sector. But I still had 6 months to go before I could take the entrance exam and then study. And it was during this period that I started to practice drawing again at the age of 22, after 7 years since the last time I had drawn steadily. I spent 6 months practicing automobile drawing (sketch), based on references I found on the internet.
I joined the design faculty in 2008 at the age of 23. The first 3 years of college were pretty cool, I was motivated and I was trying hard, practicing automotive sketching and rendering, I took 3 courses, one on automotive sketch, product sketch and one on gestalt, with designers from a very famous automotive company , I remember that I exchanged the value of these courses for my graduation with my parents.
But during all that college time I worked in parallel in the family business, and my parents couldn't stand so many expenses anymore, because they wanted me to have some financial return. So I contacted an online course company and showed my automotive and product design portfolio and offered to develop an online automotive sketch course with them, and they accepted, this was 2010. As soon as the course was launched, I received an email of the design “teachers” of the extracurricular course I took, cursing me and threatening to sue me for taking a course with the same theme as them, and for the course’s announcement having a similar theme, which I hadn’t done, but the course company.
That really hurt me, because for me these teachers were a great reference, and I had already spent more than 6 thousand reais with them, this in 2010, and the course I had created was nothing more than the result of what I had learned from them and put into practice. And after talking to them, and the online course company as well, they understood that there was no plagiarism, but the friendship and admiration was over. And that made me completely lose interest in working in the car design market, which at the time was a bubble and they were a market reference at the time.
In addition, the conflict at home grew even more with my parents, because during the 3 years of college, despite working in the family company, I was distancing myself and focusing on working directly with design, and in the year I developed the automobile sketch course the money I received was equivalent to 5 months of work, and the students liked it a lot, I had a lot of positive feedback, so I stopped working with my parents and focused on developing another course, now a product sketch, in order to mainly motivate myself, since it had lost its shine due to the situation described above. And that made more parents angry. But in the end, I completely lost the will to work in the area of automobile and product design, due to all the problems that had happened so far.
So last year of college 2011, TCC to do, with no topic in mind and no perspective for the market. Until, during the break from classes at college, talking to my professor Valdir, he told me about 3D focused on game and cinematic characters, which I only knew superficially through video games. He told me about Alex Oliver, Kris Costa and Fausto de Martini.
At the exact moment we talked, the same feeling I had when I was watching the soap opera hope with my parents appeared again. I got home and went to research on the subject and on these artists, I spent the night awake marveling at this new world in front of me, I went to work counting the hours so I could go back to college and talk to my professor again, and say that he had opened my mind and i had found my purpose, what makes my heart burn. So 2011, last year of college, I started taking classes in drawing, oil painting, there was a great master who had a small atelier on the college block for years and I didn't know.
I sold my old computer plus the money I had saved and bought a new computer. I acquired 2 courses, one in clay and one in 3D, my first 3D course was the Vitaly Bulgarov monster course and the John Brown clay course both distributed by the gnomon workshop, and I was amazed, it was a new world that opened up for the first time once in my life I found something I really liked.
However, the atmosphere at home was not wonderful, on the contrary, it was very tense. And it was in this year that after several conflicts with my parents, they sent me out of the house, I was 25 years old. So I stayed at the house of my girlfriend's aunt, current wife. And between some temp jobs and college, I was studying 3D and preparing my TCC.
I spent a year watching and practicing what I could from the tutorials, because my English was terrible, and my character-oriented artistic base was even worse, in drawing classes I was still learning to make eyes and work shading with graphite pencils. But with all the difficulty, I managed to learn enough to present my TCC which was based on a Soldier focused on articulated toys, I remember that I did the 2D sketches, the 3D model and the clay sculpture for the presentation. I was approved and finished college in 2011.
During this same period my girlfriend got pregnant with our first child, a gift I received at Christmas 2011. As there was no 3D market for me to work in the region where I live, Aparecida in the interior of São Paulo, and my 3D work was still too amateurish to try working in large studios or as a freelancer, and working as a design in the studios I had in the region was unfeasible, as the salary was lower than that of a general assistant in my parents' company.
I chose to work with him again, because my focus was on my family, I couldn't afford to choose, I needed to give them a dignified life. And I spent from 2012 to 2014 working at my parents' company, at the time I worked as a driver, making truck deliveries in São Paulo and region, and studying 3D in my spare time. During this period I managed to save a little money that allowed me to take an online course at 3D melies in 2012, where I learned the technical parts of 3D, understood what a polygon is, edges, poly loops etc…
In 2014, I took a course on characters for games, with the monster Gilberto Magno, where we became friends, and it was during this period after presenting the project I developed in the course, that I got my first job with 3D. Again it was a course, now on 3D characters for games, for an online training company. And from this, other small jobs began to appear for outsourcing and indie studios, some I only received experience, others some exchanged. Meanwhile, I worked at my parents' company.
Until, in 2016, I took a course in sculpture for collectibles with Bernardo and Bruno Zorzi. Right after the course, I did some projects for 3D print for a startup, and from that, new works started to appear in the area of custom and licensed statues. So from mid-2016, I was able to focus only on working with art developing characters for 3D print and games until now.
Carlos Jacinto
Character Artist - Located on São Paulo, Brazil