Carnival
Legacies
Official poster for the 2026 Carnival of Las Cabezas de San Juan.
Created in collaboration with tattoo artist and illustrator Manuel Cordones.
01 / Context
Official poster for the 2026 Carnival of Las Cabezas de San Juan, created in collaboration with tattoo artist and illustrator Manuel Cordones.
The project stemmed from an open call by the Ayuntamiento de Las Cabezas de San Juan for their carnival poster. Beyond the brief, the piece was born with a clear intention: to propose a dialogue between two artistic languages, digital design and plastic illustration, at a moment when both worlds tend to confront each other more than complement each other. The collaboration with Manuel Cordones, whose practice combines tattooing and painting, was the natural starting point to bring that idea to life.
02 / Concept
The coexistence of the digital and the plastic as a statement of intent: two arts, one poster.
Between Two Arts starts from a simple idea: removing the boundary between digital creation and pictorial creation. Rather than deciding which language should dominate the poster, we turned their coexistence into the concept itself. The composition is organized into three vertical sections: the outer ones belong to the graphic and digital world, while a central rupture exposes a second layer of a pictorial nature. The torn paper works as something more than a visual device: it is the gesture that allows both worlds to meet. Neither fully conceals the other; both are necessary to understand the piece.
03 / Direction
A composition in three sections where the torn paper is the gesture that unites the digital and the painted.
The art direction is built on two clearly differentiated visual planes. In the outer layer, Illustrator, Photoshop, large-scale typography, color, and graphic forms build an immediate, festive, and contemporary reading. The word "CARNAVAL" runs through almost the entire composition and is interrupted by the central tear, integrating the typography into the concept of rupture itself. Behind that first layer appears an illustration made by hand in Procreate. At its center is a large carnival mask that functions simultaneously as face, symbol, and archive. Within it, references to eleven historical groups from Las Cabezas are condensed: El Guía, Los del Río, El Don, El Levantamiento, La Quinta Estación, El Solitario, Plaza Viva, Escayolas Perico, Los Trasnochadores, Paso que voy ardiendo, and Las Cazafantasmas. Colors, patterns, garments, objects, and small scenes allow them to be incorporated without turning the poster into a literal list. The local identity continues with the church of Las Cabezas placed above the mask and with drawings of the Municipal Theatre and the Rincón Malillo integrated as sketches within the composition. The poster was designed to work at two distances: from afar it should be immediately recognized as a Carnival piece; up close it rewards observation and allows those familiar with the town's carnival history to discover additional layers of meaning.
04 / Process
A genuine collaboration between disciplines, built from the concept down to the last hidden reference inside the mask.
The process began long before illustrating the piece. First we defined what each language could contribute and how to ensure their union had a conceptual justification, not just an aesthetic one. From there we jointly built the three-section structure and the layering system that would allow that encounter to be represented visually.
Each of us worked from the discipline that forms part of their own practice: Manuel's pictorial and illustrative language and my work within design and digital creation. However, the construction of the poster was shared. The composition, the selection of references, the way of integrating them, and the relationship between the different areas were developed together until neither part could be fully understood without the other.
The most demanding phase was building the mask. Each reference had to be recognizable to those familiar with those groups, but integrated enough to keep working within a single illustration. At the same time, the outer sections were developed through vector composition, photomontage, and graphic treatment, seeking the necessary contrast with the central pictorial world.
Finally, both parts were brought together through the torn paper effect, working on edges, depth, texture, and layering until the sensation was achieved that a physical layer of the poster had been torn away to reveal another beneath it. The entire process was carried out through illustration, digital painting, vector design, and composition, without using AI image generation, making the technique itself part of the project's discourse.
05 / Impact
From proposal to official image: the winning poster that accompanied the Carnival of Las Cabezas throughout 2026.
Herencias del Carnaval: Entre dos artes won the open call and became the official poster for the 2026 Carnival of Las Cabezas de San Juan. The piece left the competition context to occupy public space and become part of the communication of one of the municipality's most recognizable celebrations.
That journey completed the meaning of the project. The references we had incorporated as a tribute to the town's carnival history returned to the very place they had come from, now turned into the image of a new edition. More than representing a festivity, the poster builds a small visual archive of its collective memory and, at the same time, puts forward a way of understanding contemporary creation in which disciplines do not need to compete to preserve their identity. They can coexist and build together something that neither would have produced alone.