Sebastian Curi's illustrations reach joyful new heights, shapes and sizes

It’s been a busy few months for Argentinian illustrator and animator Sebastian Curi. When we last chatted to Sebastian he was settled in Los Angeles, with a back catalogue of amazing clients and was working as an animation director at Buck. In just a few months everything has changed, he’s over in Vancouver for a start, “at this small but super cozy studio full of talented people called Giant Ant,” he explains and his move has inspired a breadth of illustration side projects too, which “felt amazing!”

The first illustration focused project Sebastian’s been working on is Amor de Verano, which translates as “summer love,” made in collaboration with the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Commissioned to create illustrations based off the back of his personal work, the project sees Sebastian’s illustrations reach new heights, shapes and sizes. “The amazing thing was that they really like the results and it grew into a mural on the facade of the building, posters, lounge chairs, backpacks, stickers, pins and they offered me the chance to display my work in a special room inside the cultural centre,” he explains.

Doubling up as his first solo exhibition, the walls were also filled with the shapely illustrations that drew our eye to Sebastian’s portfolio in the first place. Within Amor de Verano this is elevated as the limbs of Sebastian’s characters jump through each other, heads are always touching, smiling, dancing with particular detail to how the characters are dressed, with some fab drawings of footwear too. “It was a great project because the theme was love and how people demonstrate it,” the illustrator points out. “I was working with drawings with complex hugs and people twisted onto themselves and this felt like a great opportunity to keep exploring that. It’s great when the client chooses something from your work but lets you propose something different and not actually repeat yourself.”

Playing with body movement continues in another of Sebastian’s illustration projects, Beautiful Dancers, made back when he was living in Los Angeles. “I was trying to find something interesting to draw and DTLA [Downtown Los Angeles] served as a reference for that moment,” he says of the beginning of the project. Taking a month or two to realise the project fully, the drawings were completed in-between commercial projects, uploading them from time to time on his Instagram account. “There are 15 drawings in total but the whole process ultimately made me turn my whole attention to illustration and personal projects.”

Looking towards the rest of the year, Sebastian is settling in to Vancouver nicely and “would like to stay here for a couple of years,” exploring the new city and country with his wife. In terms of his work, the illustrator plans on becoming focussed further, working on another exhibition currently, a collaboration with Eze Pini a fellow Argentinian and graphic designer and putting more “animation into my illustrations would be great”.