Jonathan Dawson Gomez Chavez – VCD – Character Design & Illustration

THE SPY As the commemorative item, I designed a stamp to be used for Mexico, since as mentioned a big part of his career was inspired and created within the country. Loteria is a popular game in Mexico, working the same way as bingo but with items and characters instead of numbers. The watermelon, the brave, the flag, and now, El espia, or the spy, is a picture of the most popular concept of William Burroughs in terms of iconography, a bug-typewriter machine. Burroughs' themes and topics work great wit

Naked Lunch The first cover is for his most iconic book, Naked Lunch, published in 1959 and popularized by David Cronenberg’s movie adaptation in 1991. It’s a psychotropic trip through the delusions, drama, and mystery surrounding the main character’s life now that he’s engulfed in a detective task where the first, middle, and last question is always “am I here seeing this or is this just a hallucination.” A breakthrough taboo novel with clever writing. I did the cover in retrospective, with a typewriter (B

QUEER The second cover is for Queer, which is an earlier novel by Naked Lunch. It represents an earlier step of the author's writing when most of his books started as a biopic and turned weirder and weirder. From this point forward, some design choices are based in Mexico, since despite being American, Burroughs would move to live and write for a big part of his life in Mexico City, publishing his first texts there. Queer is the fictional biopic story of a young dealer traveling through Mexico to find

BURROUGHS

Based on a project to develop a series of 2 books and a commemorative item for an author, I was driven to work with the weirdness and boiling personality of William S. Burroughs, an author so acidic and over the top that strong colors, collage items, and tense relationships between the items are the door and the first warning of what comes ahead: an almost mystical author with a troubled past and even more troubled narratives.

Are we ok?

A collection of three pieces that adapt the homonymous book in three moments of her life, first we have a young girl who is enjoying an evening on the beach on an illustration that intends to be charming, lovely, nostalgic, and pacific. The second illustration has the girl, sleeping uneasy in a car while driving away from it, with a more sharp and sober figures and textures to give the idea of something being lost. But last, an illustration of an old lady holding a picture of the first image of the collection, signaling it to be her and she, happy to have returned to the sea, where she always belonged.

A caring shadow

Revenge of the purple pumpkin

Worm of doom

PANIC FABLES

PANIC FABLES has been a critical part of my development as both artist and storyteller after a close faculty member told me how great it would influence me (Thanks Ryan!) I read it and learned so much from it. Jodorowsky is often a mystical and complex figure and while a lot of that is extrapolated in Panic Fables, the book is covered with some raw brutal honest storytelling, point A directly leading to point B and makes the focus of the travel not how will we get there but how nice will it be to see it roll down. Here I have included some of my favorite panic fables I did and the final execution of my favorite one. This book is great, I recommend it and Jodorowsky’s impression of me I hope becomes more evident in my work, as I also have en

The pride of Budapest sails through its reign There's no better place to enjoy the luxurious celebrations of Hungary than the Budapest Parliament, which not only offers the finest food and spectacles but is also the prime spot to fully appreciate the air parade. Since a self-proclaimed heir of Matias Corvinus ascended to the throne and reinstated Hungary as a monarchy, if anything has remained in the present, if not already in the future, it's the Air Force. The new leader christened this fleet as the Black Army.

Water and battery in service of Venice Early morning in February, the cold fog lends a spectral appearance to a grayer Venice. The gold and orange hues of the landscape's ceilings are overshadowed, invaded, and almost completely repelled by the blank and gray tones of the cannons. Every sufficiently tall and sturdy house holds one, mandated by the state, and every homeowner or business manager has been militarily instructed in the maintenance of their gun, as well as emergency protocols to open fire in case of invasion.

Minas Gerais, for the ultimate liberation From an unstable yet unstoppable region, Brazil has unveiled its ultimate weapon to remind themselves and the world of the might of the workers. A heavily desecrated and modified statue of Christ the Redeemer, now missing its head in exchange for wielding a hammer and scythe, welcomes the new Minas Gerais with open arms. Once in Brazilian history, a dreadnought called Minas Gerais liberated the Black Brazilian population from slavery, and with this new one, the People’s Government of Brazil aims

IRON COUNTRY

An experiment in world-building where big machines and large calibers are the principles of deterrence and coexistence, Iron Country is a project where I imagined a world through printed media, having developed a propaganda poster, a mail postal, and an invitation to a political event. All of them include certain types of war machinery as a common part of the cityscape or their pride in it.

There are pieces of surrealism in the piece as well as pieces of trivia from within Canada, as representatives of different cultures and Canadian machinery, like the ARGO jet, once one of the most advanced pieces of aircraft in the world. RIDE THE STAMPEDE aims to connect the average Calgarian with a sense of belonging, pride, and color that is proud of his multiculturalist landscape and the creative outlet made possible for the people and their approach

Included are also a couple mock ups, with the idea of both having the piece displayed long and big while also be able to be fragmented to be displayed in different places, with elements wholly within each fragment to be able to tell what’s happening but also others leaving and entering the scene to suggest the bigger picture.

Included are also a couple mock ups, with the idea of both having the piece displayed long and big while also be able to be fragmented to be displayed in different places, with elements wholly within each fragment to be able to tell what’s happening but also others leaving and entering the scene to suggest the bigger picture.

Ride the Stampede

RIDE THE STAMPEDE is the name of a piece made to be displayed in public and big. I am a huge fan of Calgary myself, and it’s not hard to hear me say that I believe Calgary is like a very early New York just waiting to happen. And while the only thing that looks like New York from Calgary is the average rent, I made this project with the idea of being situated in the city. There are pieces of surrealism in the piece as well as pieces of trivia from within Canada, as representatives of different cultures and Canadian machinery, like the ARGO jet, once one of the most advanced pieces of aircraft in the world. RIDE THE STAMPEDE aims to connect the average Calgarian with a sense of belonging, pride, and color that is proud of his multi

Psychic Sword Finished piece

Early development and shape language for the chara

PSYCHIC SWORD

Working with the concept of having an illustration in just analogous colors, I developed the idea out of a DND character, where I have a tabaxi samurai, pretty much a cat Anthro girl with swords. The illustration puts the little character in a path of destruction, running over the rubble of a wall preparing both swords for a strike. Multiple spears are aiming at her already, from enemies caught off guard by the first attack but ready to retaliate before the second one. While it is a strange choice to depict a fight scene in colors of black and blue, which do not communicate that high energy, I wanted to work that intention of night, speed, and unchallenged flow from the main character. It’s like there’s no conflict, just a ghost and a cat.

Spectrum Sadako starts as an eerie but beautiful girl who runs away from home after a tragic incident with her mother and the press. In the circus, where the main character of the book searches for clues about Sadako's whereabouts, people remember her as a sad, silent girl. The only person who had an encounter with her recalls walking into the backstage and finding her sitting, watching something like a specter on a TV in the darkness. They ran away the moment they noticed the TV was unplugged. In the wo

Water, anger and a closed space The second illustration raises the stakes to the maximum, portraying probably the most gruesome part in both the book and movie adaptations. Sadako, pushed into the well, lies barely alive and floating in the green cold waters, to suffer and remain alive for 7 days. In the book’s mythology, the well is the perfect place to create an evil spirit, since all that is needed for Sadako’s will to live on is a closed space, water, and deep unforgiving hatred. Sadako uses her psychic powers, illness, an

Son A big difference between the book and the movies is that in the book, Sadako is no longer alive at any point in the main storyline, not even as a ghost. What carries on the curse and executes it 7 days after watching the tape is the virus she gestated with her powers, kind of like a ghost-psychic-virus-vengeful-spirit. At the end of the book, the main character realizes that the only way to stop the curse from completing its course is to make someone else watch the tape. That’s the actual meanin

RING RING RING

A project aimed at representing three stages in the evolution of a character, RING is an encapsulation based on the widely known girl from The Ring, with a twist to make it accurate to the books.

KING OF EUROPE

THE TRAINS

FIREFLY

TASKA .86

BEHEMOTH

FOMORIANS

BASILISK RAILWAYS

Three centuries after The Scourge, where the sun turned into bone and the
moons into blood, humanity sits at the brink of nothingness. Space has
become a hellish clouded conglomerate of energy, manifesting into
lightning and evil.
Two twin planets become the last stand of humanity, and a supply chain of
trains moving resources between them is the last effort to exist. These are
the tales of those times, when society can only worry about railways and
guns, and their performance while going through the latest hell to deliver
another day of existence to each other.