Argentinean illustrator María Luque is wholly dedicated to her work, treating it as a sort of remedy for the passage of time. “When I’m not drawing, my days sometimes seem to drag,” she told Flow Magazine. “I do like to do other things, too, like cooking, walking, getting together with friends or kissing. But only when I draw, do I feel that time stands still in some way.”
Her illustrations and paintings – full of pattern and overflowing with details – are mostly focused on women. “When I start, I already know if the drawing will succeed,” she admits adding that she works fairly quickly and without sketches. “I like to work intuitively—so that it’s almost as if my hands are putting something on paper themselves as opposed to me stopping at every movement,” she says. “I like going to a café or library to work; I listen to the conversations being had around me and look out the window at the people passing by.”
Indeed, there’s a spontaneity to her work that makes it all the more enjoyable. “Sometimes, if I am not completely satisfied with the end result, I prefer to throw the illustration away and start again because I know what didn’t work the first time round,” says Luque. “For example, recently I was drawing in my sketchbook and the picture was really taking shape, but then I made a mistake. I thought I had ruined a beautiful sketchbook, but I looked at the illustration again and drew a vase over that ‘fatal error’, which, on closer inspection, was just a minor problem.”
With more than 60k followers on Instagram, she’s clearly more right than wrong. Take a look for yourself:
