According to Augusto, he was doodling with a vector program, and the process revealed the starting point for the drawing paintings.
“I was trying to make brushes, which I’d use to eventually draw with the brush tool…”
The first building block, the striped square in the image above.
After many different trials, Augusto decided on the composition in the image below.
He had to make additional custom forms, such as the corners, the only parts that aren’t made from the initial building block.
In the non-digital ( the image at the very top ), Augusto created the drawing layer using charcoal with a straight edge. The curved lines were hand drawn and sometimes they were re-drawn/erased multiple times until Augusto felt they were correct.
Vestiges of the mistakes, smudges, are not erased. They are the tracks left behind from the interaction with the surface as the drawing is created.
The lettering is stenciled using painter’s tape. It’s not a very efficient process, since the porosity of the canvas surface, and the relatively crude stencil. Each letter is painted separately, until it dries, then the tape is peeled off and the next letter is painted. It’s a time consuming and inefficient endeavor, but Augusto claims it is the method that provides the best results for him.
“If they were perfect or letterpress-like, then I would not enjoy the making of the painting nearly as much; and I do not believe the end result would be as appealing.”