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Gastón Caba is an artist and collaborator extraordinaire. His company, We   Patterns, produces cute, colorful repeats and illustrations. What you might not know though, is that Caba collaborates with his daughter Lara for a majority of their designs, converting her sketches and illustrations into polished repeats. The results are thoughtful, commercial and a refreshing combo of street meets junior. Check out our Q & A for a window into the world of this Buenos Aires family man.

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PP: What websites do you generally start your day with- do you have a daily routine for info consumption?

GC: I don’t have a routine. I usually check random posts from my friends at Facebook and Google Buzz. I also have suscriptions to Etsy newsletter & Grain Edit. Plus I always check for updates in Drawn.ca, bibliodyssey.blogspot.com,ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com. Most of all I take advantage of the “link” idea of the internet, maybe I read about some artist on a book, and then I start a search wich leads me to other names, artworks, websites & blogs and suddenly I got 40 websites opened at the same time. I usually keep the same pages opened for a whole week. Lara is more interested in playing at Pet Society or Club Penguin.

PP: When did you both realize you had talent and how has that talent evolved over the past few years?

GC: I don’t believe in talent, I only believe in hard work & passion about what you do. I’ve been working as a professional illustrator since 10 years ago, but my interest and love for drawing has been shared with music as means to extract joy from life since I was a little kid. In Lara’s case, she’s a natural born artist as any child is, and as a father I give her my full support in a way she can understand she can build her life with the happiness that cames from an artwork completion.

Few years ago I started to work tangencially with patterns from a “sociological” point of view, using for eg. the “tag” feature of Flickr or polls by email (to friends and beyond) as inputs for my drawings. What does a specific topic means to different people and how can I grasp the shared meaning of a concept by noticing a pattern from those answers & tagged pictures? I did some images that had a huge response from the audience. Later I did a project named “People posing as a definition of group personality” about people who takes pictures of themselves and in a strange way they create a pattern in wich they can recognize their identity. It’s a fun project that reached 70000 visits only in it´s second day online.

Connected with all this, I feel I’m a little eclectic in my “style” of drawing, I mean I don’t feel I have a style (just compare this image to this one, wich is usually a pain for art directors when they hire an illustrator as they don’t really know what are they´re going to get. So I decided to open my portfolio to the several interests of mine (illustration, art, music, projects) and focus my illustration work in pattern design.

So I started working under the We Love Patterns brand, wich also allows me not only to have my own work but represent other illustrators that fits under our happy & cute vision/mision.

PP: How does age and experience play a factor in the design work you both produce as a team?

GC: Well, in the case of Lara, being a child is being pure and fresh. She delivers great ideas all the time. She’s like a sprout, only worried about being and grow. I’m interested about why should we be alive, what are the ties of our society, what’s beyond our life & comprenhension. So I focus my interest in concepts and abstracts behind the artworks. It helped me a lot to start teaching illustration and pattern design to make myself conscious of what I´ve learned through this years, to understand wich is my process of work in order to gain time and create more complex work.

For us it´s very good to have the combination of both fresh & age experience together.

PP: Please explain the process you last used to tackle a design problem.

GC: I start figuring out wich my two/three keywords are, then I explore the universe of those words in many sources as different as possible. I first do a conceptual map (as huge as possible) to check all the derivative words, searching for second, third and fourth level connection between words. For eg. if my concept is “family” I found that “holidays” is related, then “beach” is related to “holidays.” so I explore all the universe of the beach to find what can I use as a metaphore. Then I found the “sand castle”, so I connect it to “house.” Other connection from “family” is “mother”, “child.” Connected to both there´s “night tales.” Then I think about “the three bears and goldilocks”. So if I connect “sand castle” to the “three bears” I can make a drawing about the “three bears” with bath suits in their “sand castle,” “Papa bear” would be the king of the castle, “Mama bear” would be the “queen of the beach,” and the “baby bear” would be buring “goldilocks” in the sand up to the head.

As I mentioned before, I use Flickr/Google/Stock-images banks as an input to know people shared point of view about concepts and ways of represent them. I do a concept sheet to easily take visual reference of where I’m heading to. Then I start to sketch a rough layout. Then I sketch the multiple parts of the artwork separately. It may take from a day to a week, depends on the artwork. Once I got all done I do a final layout with the selected sketches and then I start the final artwork. I always show my design to as many people as I can before I deliver it, I believe in external critique as part of my own process.

PP: It seems (from your website) that you primarily work in vector illustration- do other creative techniques influence your work?

GC: Vector is only a finishing tool that allow us to have our artworks available in any size and easy-to-edit colours. All my artworks are based on pencil, marker or ink drawings. A few of them are traced with geometrical vectors, most of them are scanned and traced automatically from hi-res bitmap b/w images, so the vector you see is the same figure that I originally draw. I’m influenced by silk-screen in the way that I do all the elements of a drawing separated by color layer, then I put them together in Illustrator. There’s also a big influence of collage techniques in my work but maybe in a conceptual level, as I love to introduce unexpected elements and error.

PP: How do commercial and pop culture trends play a part in your work? Do you believe it’s a factor that drives your design?

GC: I prefer to think of myself as a trend setter, besides it’s true or not. I consider myself a player in the pop culture. I’m part of a big group of people globally (all the artists that contributes to Pictoplasma, Murakami & Nara being at the top of it somehow). We all have been working hard since at least 10 years ago in the character/cute/kawaii trend that it´s being very popular since the last few years. I’m driven by my own twisted interest and I take more from the past (mostly from 1910 to 1970) than from the present trend. This doesn´t mean I’m disconnected, as I cannot exist as a creator without the communication technologies that are available today. As Borges said: “I can’t avoid being contemporary.”