Tempesta di Mare commissioned Mads Torres to create the lead artwork for our 2024-25 Season. Catch up with Mads in a conversation they had with our Coordinator of Production and Administration, Sarah Giampietro:
What made you want to become an artist?
Honestly, I can’t imagine doing anything else. Art has always felt more like a necessity than a choice, and I’ve made art for as long as I can remember.
Storytelling in particular is very important to me, and I’ve tapped into that in a lot of different ways – making music, writing, and of course drawing. I became invested in the intersections of those different mediums throughout high school, and college was a way for me to explore as much of that as possible: through making comics, learning animation, and designing book covers and posters. Once I figured out that I could potentially do all of those things professionally, I just wanted to hit the ground running.
Mostly, I just like to surprise myself. There is something fantastic about starting with a little spark of an idea and just following it to wherever it takes you. That feeling never gets old, and it’s something that I want to do for as long as I can.
What inspires you?
Horror and fantasy! Anything offbeat, usually in the form of comics and music. Some of my favorite artists are Emily Carroll, Jeff Lemire, Becky Cloonan, and Mike Hawthorne, and I’m admittedly a huge My Chemical Romance fan (I like anything tinged with that sort of melodrama). Visually, I’ve always been drawn to botanical elements – especially flowers – and try to incorporate their symbolism into my work often.
What is your usual process like?
My current work is primarily digital (Procreate and Clip Studio Paint are a great duo), but my roots are in mixed media traditional art. When I’m working digitally, I try to maintain as many hand-drawn elements as possible through a wide variety of brushes and textures, especially when inking! I build up layers of marks and colors similarly to how I would with traditional materials.
Coloring and adding texture is my absolute favorite part of any illustration, and I want all of my work to be as saturated and bold as physically possible.
Did your process for the Tempesta differ from your usual? Can you tell us how you made the Tempesta artwork? Can you tell us how you came up with the ideas for the different drawings?
I really enjoy making artwork inspired by music, so working with Tempesta to create this series was an exciting and unique challenge because the process was very familiar to me, but the source material was very different from anything I’d ever worked from before!
I initially dove into research to try and best understand the aesthetics of this era, and was very interested in celebrating the intricacies of the instruments’ individual designs. I wanted to harness the energy of the music through my mark making, and aimed to capture that flowing, magical aspect of each piece by creating each visual composition as I “heard” it. What followed was a balance of deriving from the source material – making sure that I was representing some of the specific stories and histories of each program – and putting my own spin on it!
I also drew heavily from my love of flowers, combining the symbolic and visual significance of different flowers to tie all of the pieces together: whether using more classical inspirations – Italy’s national flower, the white Madonna lily, and bright red poinsettias to celebrate the winter season – or exploring the way flower bulbs’ layered appearance could reflect compositions inspired by each other.
What are you working on now?
In addition to working as a freelance illustrator, I am currently drafting my first graphic novel, Beneath the Jet Black Sky: a queer horror-fantasy story about vampires, magic, and doing the wrong things for the right reasons. When I’m not writing, I’m working away at posters, vis dev projects, and weird little comics about my cats.
For more information on Mad’s work, visit www.madstorres.com.