Architect’s draftsman turned illustrator: Daniel Lima’s colourful version of reality

Daniel Lima was introduced to illustration while working as a draughtsman at an architecture firm, an unusual preface to his illustration career in which he creates highly coloured versions of reality.

Following his stint in architecture, Daniel studied fine art at the University of Arts and Design in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. During this time the illustrator was given the opportunity to create work “spreading across several areas: animation, film, scenography, graphics, press illustration, comics,” he explains. Now, Daniel is in the tutor role teaching illustration at Ar.Co, Lisbon.

Daniel’s unexpected source of inspiration is putting constraints on his work. “Specifically the probable impossibility of an inter-semiotic translation between text and image,” he tells It’s Nice That. “Since it feeds the opacity, paradox and irony which move away univocal interpretations.” Using this as a starting point Daniel also explains that Photoshop, “as a software, continues to surprise me, by its possibilities of chance and improvisation”.

We came across Daniel’s work via Latvian publishers, Kuš!, an example of “iconoclastic art directors and editors with respect to image, edition, illustration and the like,” which he prefers to work with. The illustrator explains the difficulty he finds in describing his work but describes it as an “inclination towards comic-tragic theatre, that drowns authorship in the vagaries of drawing and random ideas”.