About

Intro and Bio

Estrella Vega is a printmaker, illustrator, cartoonist and graphic designer who recently moved to Miami, Florida from New York City. She has been making her own books for 10 years, using a combination of self-publishing platform lulu.com and her own silkscreening abilities. In 2016, thanks to a Kickstarter, she independently published “The Paleozoic” series, a series of 5 books illustrating life before the dinosaurs. She is currently continuing the series with “The Mesozoic”, and recently published the first book for that era.  Estrella has exhibited her work at MOCCA, BCGF, CAB, APE, CAKE, TCAF, GrandFestival, Locust Moon, Book Con and Book Expo. Aside from her self-initiated artistic pursuits, Estrella makes a living as a graphic designer.

Her guiding principle in bot design and art can be boiled down to “Life is short, so make it count”. As such, she’s fast and attempts to create work that’s innovative enough to captures people’s attention.

Biography

Estrella Vega was born in a suburb outside of Paris, France. Because of the Cuban half of her family, her family moved to Miami, Florida, when she was ten years old. As a result of her somewhat “international” background, Estrella fancies herself as someone who has no place to call “home”. She likes to learn languages. She’s a decent trilingual (French, Spanish, English) and hopes to become fluent in German, Japanese and at some point Chinese. Aside from languages, Estrella is also interested in science, and biology specifically (with a bit of astronomy obviously). If she hadn’t been hit by the philosophical maladies known as existentialism and nihilism, she might have become a doctor. Instead she received a double Bachelor of Science in Motion Pictures and Fine Arts from the University of Miami in 2001, then later attended the Miami Ad School which led to her first job in advertising in New York City. While working as an art director, Estrella achieved her dream of going to art school by taking continuing education classes at the School of Visual Arts. It is through these classes, she developed her art by learning printmaking, illustration, comics and animation. In 2010, after surviving a bout with breast cancer, Estrella quit her full-time job at the advertising agency to focus on doing personal art pieces. She exhibited at her first comic festival, MOCCA, the following year, and has since exhibited at BCGF, CAB, APE, CAKE, TCAF, GrandFestival, etc. In 2016, she successfully launched and funded a Kickstarter to self-publish her series of books about Paleozoic life. Estrella continues to make a living as a graphic designer.

Estrella’s Design porfolio

Awards

3×3 magazine, 2013
Applied Arts magazine, 2006

Online reviews of “The Paleozoic”

Evolution doesn’t stop for page breaks, Why should we?
Book Review: The Paleozoic concertina picture book by Estrella Vega
The Paleozoic: a series about life before the dinosaurs
This Mesozoic Month: January 2018″
Good Ok Bad Review

Misc

Whitney Museum: Comic Zine Party
Tiny Crush
Comic Beat CAB 2017 preview

My Skillset

SOFTWARE

Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, Flash, Dreamweaver, Powerpoint, Keynote, Word, Excel

COMPUTER LANGUAGES

HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, PHP, MySQL, Actionscript, WordPress

ART

Photography, Illustration, Storyboarding, Book-making, Animation, Silkscreen, Etching, Letterpress, RISO printing, Piano

LANGUAGES

French, Spanish, learning German and Japanese