New Signing Alert! - Lola Beltrán

Lola Beltrán is a Spanish graphic artist and illustrator currently based in Valencia, Spain. Lola's style combines anything from comics, manga, animated cartoons, first internet era to classic Hollywood movie posters. Her ability to combine traditional drawing techniques and digital tools, as well as screen printing or lithography, not to mention a huge serving of sass, is truly unique.

Right now she’s in the final stages of a house renovation, but she’s dusted herself off, unplugged the sander and we've manage to grab a moment of her time for a quick dive into how it all started and where it’s going...

Take us back to beginning, Lola. Where did it all start and how did your visual language evolve?
I owe my creativity to solitude and a desire to be good at something to try to catch my mother's attention. Growing up without much parental guidance, drawing became both escape and structure. I was obsessed with Sailor Moon and Jem, copying them endlessly and imagining alternate worlds. That early need for a private universe eventually became a career.

As time went by a wealth of other influences informed my creative development; MTV, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Katsuhiro Otomo, Moebius,Yoshitaka Amano and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto were foundational. Their graphic boldness and narrative clarity shaped how I think about image-making.

I started mixing my initial anime references with 50s American illustrators, Hollywood golden era movie posters and comics. The real shift came when I learned screen printing in Germany, it taught me discipline in color and layering. Now I work with a reduced palette, usually no more than five colors, building volume through contrast by using black lines, 2 colours for shadows and 2 colours for lights rather than too many gradients. My style has become more intentional, graphic, and controlled.

 

More recently, artists like Cleon Peterson, Ugo Bienvenu, Timba Smits, and (CIA’s) Matt Taylor continue to inspire me. My visual language is deeply rooted in pop culture. Traveling has allowed me to build a mental archive, galleries, museums, vintage shops, packaging, menus. Seeing Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol at The Broad, and Hajime Sorayama in Tokyo, sharpened my understanding of how pop imagery can be both commercial and subversive. My work is a collage of those accumulated references.

And now, aside from the home renovations, what does your working day look like and what have you been working on?

I share a studio with my partner, illustrator Pedro Oyarbide. Our desks mirror each other, screens, Cintiqs, a bit of chaos. Working side by side is challenging, we give unsolicited feedback to each other, oftenly ending up in silly fights ha! but in the end these help to deliver better stuff. If I could relocate for a year, I’d choose Los Angeles, (once the orange man is out of course). I´ve been to LA a few times and I feel extremely attracted to its decadent beauty, the light, the weather and  the vibe.

A couple of projects stand out: the Dune cover for Little White Lies and the Rosalía comic for GQ. Both allowed me to combine strong pop iconography with narrative illustration in a way that felt completely aligned with my voice. But I’m always looking ahead to the next project, I once pitched a proposal to paint a massive basketball court in Guangzhou for Jordan/Nike, something on that scale would be amazing to revisit. I’d also love to create an LP cover for one of my fav bands like The Growlers or Mattiel.

 

See Lola’s brand new folio here

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