Bookmarks for all kind of people
It is a band-aid floating in space, surrounded by the phrase “Cura sana culito de rana”, that thing you say to little kids when they hurt themselves so they stop crying. It's silly on purpose, a small comfort joke turned into an image.
Comes straight from infectious gut bacteria given a cute, rounded-off makeover. Vibrio, Giardia, Cryptosporidium, Salmonella, Entamoeba, Listeria, and E. coli, all looking way friendlier than they have any right to.
This one follows the same logic but flips to the healing side, fibroblasts, macrophages, and dendritic cells doing their wound-healing job, with E. coli and Clostridium thrown back in for balance.
This set started as an excuse to dig back into old project material, mix it with some purely speculative work, and package everything into a small series of bookmarks that could hold together as a collection. They ended up becoming a bestseller at fairs. It is something people use daily, buy for themselves or as gifts, and connect with because of the different themes behind each one.
Putting them together as a set felt right. There's a thread of "body stuff": some funny, some gross, and some healing. All of them are drawn in the same style, so they work as a little collection rather than four random images.
About it
The Challenge
Bookmarks are a tight format, with not much room, and whatever goes in has to read instantly at a narrow scale. The challenge was to take material from very different sources (old lab illustrations, personal pieces, a joke from childhood) and make them feel like they belong in the same series, with a thread running through them that isn't forced.