We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Santiago Villegas-Giraldo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Santiago below.

Santiago, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I wish I had started sooner. Before I took art seriously I was pursuing a career in science, hoping to become a mathematics and physics teacher and investigator. I was going to college for that and realized that art was my real passion and what gave me the strength to keep going during the hardest times. At that point, drawing was only a hobby and something that I did to take me out of the routine and to cheer me up as I was failing exam after exam. Dropping out of college was scary and liberating, especially coming from a family of scholars and teachers and considering that I decided to learn art on my own terms, without being in any institution.
I don’t regret that I studied science. I learned a lot of wonderful things that I use in my daily life as an artist and as a person. I have knowledge in nature from physics and the mental structure and logic of a mathematician. But I regret how long it took me to leave. I see the last two years in university as lost, my mental health deteriorated significantly and it took me years to recover my confidence.
I have achieved more as an artist than I would have as a scientist and I often wonder where I would be right now if I had started sooner.

Santiago, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My artist name is Santi of all Trades because I am a very multi-passioned artist. I love juggling, crafts of all kinds, mural painting, illustration, worldbuilding, game design, music, and whatever new hobby I am hyperfixating on at 2am any given day. My main thing is digital illustration. I am very technique oriented detailed. I am very serious with my execution but very silly with my topics. So my work is usually childish, whimsical, fantastical, funny, and cute, but done with a lot of care and time. My artistic influence is called imaginative realism, the discipline that wishes to portray things that you wouldn’t be able to see in real life, but as if they actually existed, such as dragons, mermaids, wizards, anthropomorphic animals, aliens, etc. Naturally, I love fantasy, science fiction and superheroes. My personal work has turned me into some sort of business owner too. I have created two projects where I sell stickers, prints, pins and other products with my art. the first one is Lost in the City, where the protagonist is a cute NYC rat that explores the city and enjoys street food. The other one was made with fantasy art in mind. World of Kataa is about fantastic animals and creatures as fairies, wizards, warriors, etc.
both projects have taken me to vendor tables at conventions, artist alleys, retail stores and just having a table where I sell stickers at the park.
On the other hand, I am in the process of building my career as an illustrator in the more traditional sense, doing covers for magazines, personal commissions of characters and pets, logos, etc. Long term I would like to establish myself as a game illustrator, I particularly love board games and card games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the gathering. I will also keep working on my personal projects and have a few game ideas that I wish to bring to life with my own characters and intellectual property.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I used to believe that an artist would naturally be discovered by having really good work. But the reality is that networking, building community and communication are other important skills that are required to be a well-rounded artist. there is so much more to being an artist than just making art.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I don’t have a huge audience, but the moment it started was when my work got an identity. The world is full of amazing artists and the only way to stand out is to be recognizable. My work became recognizable as soon as I started my Lost in the City series, I painted only New York rats for a while and the rats slowly developed a fanbase. I have seen other artists doing it with cats, sheep, buildings, etc. Just find a thing you like and stick with it for a while. It is constraining but it’s a good practice to be consistent. I appreciate the fact that I gave my project its own name and identity separate from my own, so I have the freedom to create new unrelated projects as I later did with World of Kataa.

Contact Info:

• Website: santiofalltrades.com
• Instagram: santiofalltrades
• Other: My series have their own instagrams too lostinthecity.art worldofkataa