Featured Artist: GHaller

This week’s Featured Artist GHaller jokes that he loves cereal. To GHaller, cereal is not an ordinary breakfast food; it is a moment of calm before he starts his day or the chance to indulge in a sweet colorful escape that reminds him of childhood. A true artist sees the extraordinary in the ordinary – even in a bowl of cereal – and GHaller strives to accomplish this in both his daily life and through his art.

He believes that creativity is the ability to make “something new and surprising from something ordinary.” Whether it’s hair that flows like a waterfall or a sushi roll with an anxious personality, GHaller’s art brings a touch of extraordinary to the ordinary.

GHaller, or Carlos Sánchez, is a 28-year-old illustrator and comic-aficionado from Barcelona, Spain. He finds “inspiration everywhere” around him. He teases that he puts Post-It notes on anything that sparks an idea for a project and says, “you should see my shelves, some books have almost all the pages full of post-its.” He likes to start small and then brainstorm “what makes [the design] special, why is it different, and slowly it gets personality and it becomes something extraordinary.”

As a comic artist and cartoonist, he loves being able to lose himself in “silly cartoons” and was fascinated by comics and animated shows as a young child. In fact, his current work is heavily influenced by these cartoons and they continue to shape the style and direction of his work.

In the future, he hopes to make a comic or a graphic novel, but he is also intrigued by the idea of 3D illustration, animation, and toy art. Nonetheless, one of his greatest achievements was taking part in an illustrated self-help book for children struggling to make friends. He hopes that his art can inspire children the same way that art inspired him when he was young.