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As I had never created a physical portfolio before, I needed to see some examples of illustrators who created their portfolios, and how each one organized their work.

This video, made by illustrator Jesse Engle, gives me an idea of ​​how I separate my work into sections. Placing the name on the page to the right with an illustration representing the session that would follow on the page on the left.

Despite that, I don't like how she finalized her portfolio, getting something more amateurish or homemade.

But in the organization part, I consider it important the way she did it.

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She has a very particular art style. With her bold and minimalist style, which is usually described as pop art.

In her work, the use of space and color stands out, in their positive and negative formats;

whose beauty has established her as one of the UK's most sought after graphic artists.

She uses a bold and minimum approach on her site, too, presenting her work as one big collage (plus using a few animated GIFs).

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Alex Gamsu Jenkins is an illustrator, cartoonist and animator from London. His work has a dark sense of humor, exploring themes that combine surreal and absurd.

Alex's style is already presented as soon as you enter the site, with its various animated gifs, already showing what his artistic style is. In addition to having a totally flashy logo, with extremely vibrant colors and black background, which differs a little from traditional websites.

The site has a lot of information on the landing page, which I think might not be the way wanted to go. However, animated gifs on the homepage are a different way to showcase your work. And it's something I was thinking of using for my website, because the person could already have an idea of what style I use, without having to put several projects on the homepage.

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The civil war in Yemen began in 2014. On one side, with the support of Iran, where the Houthi, a Shiite group considered a rebel militia. On the other side were the government of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the Sunni coalition that supported him. When the Shiites took the capital and the northern part of the country, the government fled to the south, but remained with the support from Saudi Arabia.

Considered by the UN the worst humanitarian situation in the world, the war in Yemen has already condemned around 20 million to hunger, in addition to practically irreversible infrastructure and economic damage, including the destruction of buildings, schools, hospitals, factories, plants and the widespread bankruptcy of local companies.

Since the civil war consumed practically all the resources and labor available in the region. In nine years, more than 230,000 people were killed.

Minors are taken to border towns, where they are trained to defend the Saudi borders. This cities are the scenes of several confrontations between the coalition and the Houthi rebels.

According to the Annual Report of the secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict, carried out on August 24, 2017, there were 517 cases of recruitment and use of male children, with only 11 years.

Consequently, the action plan signed by the Government of Yemen in 2014 with the aim of ending and preventing the recruitment and use of children by the Yemeni Armed Forces has remained stalled due to the ongoing conflict.

UN estimates nearly 3.500 children have been confirmed to have been recruited and deployed in Yemen’s civil war. However, a senior Houthi military official told the Associated Press in 2018 that the group had 18,000 child soldiers in it army.

“These naive young men should never be seduced and recruited to fight in the war. The government should send them back home and to schools. But in times like these, conscience is dead. They are welcomed with open arms.” Said All Hammed, father of a 15 year old, who went in search of work but has not returned home.

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“Emotions weren’t allowed,” he continued. “For example a nine-year-old boy cried because they missed their mother and they were shot,”

Ishmael Beah recalls how his life changed drastically after his first killing : “ killing became like drinking water”

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https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/shocking-video-shows-russian-kids-going-through-military-training-in-crimea/

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Logo of the Young Army Cadets National Movement

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Logo of the Young Army Cadets National Movement

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Sons of Russia: Documentary about the use of child soldiers in Russia - Ukraine war.

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Sons of Russia: Documentary about the use of child soldiers in Russia - Ukraine war.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7dYXYI8PdCE

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The war between Russia and Ukraine is a conflict that started on February 20, 2014, when Russia illegally invaded the Crimea peninsula in south Ukraine, claiming as part of the Russian territory.

After a long period marked by heightened tensions between the two, Russian troops invaded the neighboring country on February 24, 2022, promoting attacks on cities located near the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, and other strategic points in the Ukrainian territory. The counterattack carried out by Ukraine in mid 2022 caused Russia to retreat at some point, but the country still maintains dominance over large areas in eastern and southern Ukraine.

While sending elderly men to Ukraine, Russia seeks to indoctrinate kindergarten children and teach them to use weapons of war, such as grenade launchers and an AK-47 assault rifle.

The information began to circulate when images spread on social networks in which Pavel Firsov, from the militaristic Combat Brotherhood movement, is seen teaching four and five year old children on how to use weapons.

Children as a weapon of war is another of Vladmir Putin’s war strategies in Ukraine. The Kremlin does not hide it and boast about it. A video broadcast by the Russian news agency shows minors in a school in Crimea - a peninsula illegally annexed by Russia - training with rifles and performing hand to hand combat exercises.

The Young Army movement is the Kremlin’s latest attempt to mobilize and provide basic military skills in Russian youth. Providing military training programs for Russian youth is a not a recent development. During the Soviet period, basic military training was incorporated into most school curriculums.

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Beasts of no nation is based on the novel by Nigerian descended author Uzodinma Iweala. It is set in an unmanned African country, in order to represent sectarian conflicts that broke out in different parts of the continent. The war drama follows Agu, a child full of vitality and imagination, who loses his parents and siblings during the conflict and is forced to mature in order to survive the war.

From his happy childhood, albeit with its limitations, to the moment he is separated from his family and recruited as a soldier in the Commander’s (Idris Elba) resistance army, the boy undergoes physical transformations that only reflects the wear and tear of his psyche under the suffered lobotomy. From a child full of life, to a war machine (almost) without feelings.

Despite everything, the director and screenwriter still maintains a spark of hope in the figure of his protagonist, who in his conversations with God shows remnants of a child who is afraid of weapons and, especially, of being away from his mother.

My project is especially about this topic. Involving the issue of child soldiers, which are still used in world conflicts, but not paid as much attention as they should.

The movie Beasts of a Nation opened my eyes to this topic, and presented me with a journey that felt like I had been punched in the gut. It's not an easy movie to watch, but it needs to be extremely graphic to show how a child can be manipulated and broken so easily, and can commit the most horrifying acts possible, and not knowing the difference of right or wrong.

The trajectory of the Agu is sad and realistic. An urgent denunciation of horrors to which the children are subjected in the midst of any war, resulting in the loss of innocence and the growth of hate as a discourse.

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Come and See is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film, directed by Elem Klimov.

Filmed over nine months, having spent eight years to be approved by the Goskino (State Committee for Cinematography), Come and See became one of the most ruthless, raw and widely dramatized portrayals of the World War II. We follow the story of Florya, a 13 year old boy who joins the Soviet guerrillas against the Nazis in Belarus, and soon finds himself away from his companions, which forces him to undertake a journey of pain, fear and violence as he sees the horrendous attitudes of his enemies and his countrymen along the way.

Florya then survives, in a series of events that begin to reshape his personality ( and which, at the end of the film, will make him look older than he actually is), and with the help of Glasha, he conquers the most costly opportunity of returning to the village he left a short time ago, only to find the massacre carried out there, and finally, almost halfway through of Come and See, starting to pay for his sins in the midst of a conflict.

The field of view that the camera provides makes us witness the savagery of the occupation of Belarus. Florya makes eye contact with us at different times, in a frontal facial close-up that reveals his expression of fear and despair. We can notice the details of the very well constructed makeup, giving Florya lines of expression that builds a face of premature aging, of consternation, of “marks of war”, even though he is teenager, not been more than 13 years old.

No wonder, the Soviet Union was the one that had the most human losses in the war. Between 20 and 35 million Soviet citizens perished in the World War II. A third of Belarusian inhabitants were killed during the years of the German invasion.

I discovered this movie through a recommendation from a classmate. I was surprised when I watched it, because it is a more contemplative war film, where you, the viewer, travel through the most horrendous moments of a war that has been exhaustively documented in films and books throughout history, but in a vision of a teenager. Florya presents the naturalness and innocence of a peasant teenager who wants to fight for his country, and be a hero, turning himself into a psychologically, physically and spiritually shattered victim by the events he witnessed. However, the violence in the film is treated in a very measured way, not being overexposed in key passages, leaving it to the public’s imagination what must be happening to the victims at certain times. Something that can be even more terrifying.

The director Elem Klimov, didn’t want to shock anyone, but to expose, with all the cinematographic refinement that can exist while walking through a nightmare, life as it is when all of Man’s animosity falls on it, and infiltrates it, making it a hell on Earth.

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First they Killed my Father marks the return of actress and director Angelina Jolie, bringing this cinematographic work based on true facts. The film is based on a book of the same name, which tells the story of young Loung Ung and her trajectory to escape the regime of dictator Pol Pot, in Cambodia.

Daughter of a high ranking official in the Cambodian government, the girl had a privileged life until her early childhood. Everything changed in April 1975, when one of the worst regimes in history was established in the country, the Khmer Rogue, responsible for the death of about 2 million Cambodians at the time. When the army invaded the city, Loung and her family were at serious risk, as her father was a government agent. For a while, they disguised themselves and managed to stick together, but Loung parents were discovered and executed. From there, Loung had to flee and ended up in a child soldier training camp, where she was trained to become one of the members of the communist army. Her brothers were sent to a forced labor camp.

Despite all the suffering, the young girl did not give up on changing her life. At the age of ten, she managed to escape to Thailand with one of her brothers and, years later, she arrived in the United States.

Although this is a particularly significant undertaking for Jolie (as an activist around the world, one of her children is from Cambodia), and perhaps because of this, one of the fundamental greatnesses for “First they Killed my Father” to work as a dramatic work is the fact that contains only Cambodian actors and actresses, being all spoken in their native language. This decision in my opinion gives fidelity to the real story lived by those people and contributes to the drama being felt in a more visceral way.

But something that I really like in the movie, is how Jolie discusses relevant and relatively current issues of world geopolitics as subtexts of what we are following.

At the beginning of the film, for example, we are introduced to speeches by the then US president, Richard Nixon, in which he reiterates respect for Cambodia’s neutrality as a geographical component of Southeast Asia, where the Vietnam war was unfolding, only to see later the country’s bombing of Cambodian cities and the unbridled struggle for territory conquests. It then becomes clear how this inflamed the local population to adept the Anti-American ideology, after the withdrawal of the military troops from the capitalist side, enabled the rise of a totalitarian regime that caused even more misery to its people. Interventionist actions by the United States caused chaos in a country’s domestic and regional order, a large number of deaths and flight of people, as well countless tragedies and humanitarian disasters.

The US war in Afghanistan which lasted 20 years from October 2001 until August 2021, has plunged the region into deep chaos and has directly led to 11 million refugees and the deaths of over 30,000 innocent civilians.

The war in Iraq launched by the United States and by the United States and the high intensity military intervention in the Syrian war not only caused the spread of terrorist forces such as the Islamic State and conflict and turmoil in the Middle East, but also resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 civilians and left more than 5 million people refugees.

So we can say that the film is more current than ever when it comes to this issue of American interventionism.

Betting on a local cast and the majority without any acting experience, Angelina Jolie hits on the protagonist who guides us through her personal cathartic process without uttering many words. Her eyes speak more than any dialogue.

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A documentary by the war correspondent, writer and filmmaker, Hernán Zin, who can be seen on Netflix. The documentary was shot during the offensive against the Gaza Strip in 2014, and portrays the daily lives of ten children between the bombs and the destruction caused during and after Israel’s terrorist attacks.

What led the director Hernán Zin to produce the documentary were the terrifying images of one of the air strikes on a beach in Gaza, which resulted in the death of four children, when they were plying football. Cases like this are the so- called “side effects” practiced by the Israelis, which cannot distinguish between children and military combatants.

Born in Gaza translates the effort of the Palestinians to overcome the traumas after the attacks, in a forceful way and through testimonies, such as those of Mohamed, a boy who look for things in the landfills to sell and support his family, since his father can not work. Mahmud, son of a Palestinian peasant who had his crops destroyed and lambs and camels killed by Zionist attacks.

The facts of destruction and deaths reported in the documentary are part of the history of Gaza, where the Israeli occupier carries out a permanent cruel aggression as a way to legitimize the Zionist colonial occupation and illegally expand the territory assigned to Israel.

The United States supplied fighter jet and bomb attacks are aimed at destroying Gaza’s infrastructure, creating chaos, promoting ethnic cleaning and thereby weakening Palestinian resistance.

The documentary is very impressive because, you can see how these people have nothing, they are in miserable situations, in a country that does not have an army, or tanks or fighter jets to face Israel, so I can say that it is a lost war. And the saddest thing is to see how these children do not have perspectives in life, and that they and their families try to take one day at a time trying to ignore the conflict and live their lives in a more "normal" way.

That's why I find it so relevant to my project about child soldiers. Because many times these children are induced to take part in the war, because they have no chance of living, and they are induced by radical groups that incite hatred. And although the documentary does not address this issue, it is something very common to happen to these children.

In addition to the perspective of the other side, which is not as talked about as it should be and few people actually advocate on behalf of Palestine.

The testimonies are moving and clearly report the tragic experience and the effects of the Israeli occupation on their lives, as when Mahmud says: “We don’t have missiles or tanks. We grow vegetables, not bombs”.

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A house made of splinters by Simon Lereng Wilmont, tells the story of a childcare center in eastern Ukraine. An intimate and frightening portrait of the effect that the permanent state of war in Ukraine has on the poorest families and their children.

The director Simon Wilmont discovered that there were many children whose parents had died in the war, or who had been estranged from their parents due to neglect, addictions and traumas. There are these temporary shelters across the region where children go for up to nine months until the state figures out what to do with them - some children go home, others are adopted, and some go to a permanent orphanage run by the state. This whole tragic situation gives you a sense of the devastating impact of the long - term consequences of war.

The narrative draws not only on the inevitability of the present, but on the belief that, among the disasters along the way these children are subject to, there is a need to keep alive their own illusion of being children.

There is vestiges of the immense lack of love in their families, causing the effect of the girls regularly drinking alcohol, the traces of self mutilation in the arms, among other marks.

In it, however, resides happy endings or happy beginnings, small moments when it seems that the outside world does not exist and there are possibilities in the near future. This is a very immediate sensation and when confronted with the idea of the future, the children cannot answer what it might be - but there is that hope.

I consider the documentary extremely important mainly because we are witnessing children in an environment prone to hostility, where all caregivers try to do their utmost to keep them safe. In addition, the documentary was made before the invasion in eastern Ukraine, where the worst had yet to come.

It's not an easy documentary to watch, mainly because we see these children losing their innocence earlier than they should and having extremely self-destructive habits, which is impossible not to sympathize with.

In addition to being very important for my project , for showing that in a war it is the people or the civilians who suffer most of the time, and that they need to resist and try to live one more day regardless of the problems.

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Winter on Fire is a 2015 documentary film, about the protests in Ukraine.

In the late 2013 and early 2014, a large group of students occupied Maidan Square in Kiev, capital of Ukraine, protesting against President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to proceed with negotiations on the country’s entry in the European Union, a decision that today, in the current situation, it would have helped the country very much in the war.

Yanukovych was a nostalgic dictator of communism elected under the guise of a Democratic president. Protesters were summoned through social networks and would remain camped until their demands were met. But the protests took on gigantic proportions and thousands of people went to the scene after Berkut, the local police, responded with extreme violence, and the situation turned into a war with tear gas bombs, fighting, blood, shooting. That a civil war had broken out in central Kiev.

Winter on Fire documents these 93 days of tension and pitched battle, people with determination and organization building barricades, tents and food - so that their voices could be heard and the Ukrainians could join the European Union and finally get out of the stale communism, a regime that did not and will never work anywhere.

I watched the documentary recently mainly to understand what actually happened to bring about such events in Ukraine in February 2022, and its long feud with Russia.

Although I liked the documentary, I think it has some flaws.

It is restricted to testimonies and does not show the complexity of the division of Ukrainian society, with a pro-Russian population in the east and the other, majority, in favor of rapprochement with the European Union.

The film also does not mention the participation of Nazi-inspired groups, identified in the images by the red and black flags in the occupation of the square, even though they were a minority.

The fact is that the documentary needs to be watched with a certain skepticism, but I consider it very important to understand the beginning of the war against Russia that started in February 2014.

And I consider it important for my work, mainly to understand that in a war there is always a duality, nothing is black and white, there are always shades of gray in a conflict.

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Directed by Tatiana Huezo, the films tells the story of Ana a girl who lives in the isolated Sierra de Guerrero, the poorest area of one of the most violent Mexican states, with her mother Rita and always accompanied by her two best friends - her father left the family to work in the US and never hears from him.

Prayers for the stolen is from the perspective of children, girls in their early childhood and in the passage of time, early adolescence.

The three protagonists as children create a space of solace and security, huddling together and playing at reading each other’s minds. These few moments of joy and childish interaction are just small reliefs that the narrative provides, because, from the point of view of the 3 girls, there is the gradual invasion of violence in all aspects of their lives. At the same time, the acts of the adults give clues to children and spectators of what happen next. The scene in which Ana and Paula’s long hair is cut, with their mothers claiming to get rid of lice, but actually to give them a more masculine and appearance.

The violence and danger of being a woman. Their existence is denied, to the point where this girls cut their hair short and wear baggy clothes, like boys, so as not to be observed and taken by traffickers to an unusual and predictable destination.

The dispute between cartels make the whole situation even more complicated. The children never know how long they will have classes, as teachers, who are always threatened, and always leaving. Neighbors never know who will be next victim of narco demonstrations of power or discontent.

In my opinion, it was essential to approach this story through the eyes of a little girl. In my project about child soldiers, I want to look at and talk about the brutal context of violence from a different point of view. For me, it is important to build a story where the monster is not seen. We understand the impact just by the girls’ faces, their reactions and what happens to them. Violence is transmitted in Ana’s big eyes, so surprised to see the world.

The movie provides typical childhood traits and a honest look at this violent world. At the same time, this is a challenging look: the girls question what they are living with their mothers. They have a critical sense developed in the family and in the rural school.

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Fax from Sarajevo reports, in a journalistic way, the horrors committed during the Siege of Sarajevo: the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, having been carried out by Serbian forces of the self-proclaimed Republic Srpska and the Yugoslav People’s Army. It lasted from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996, during the Bosnian War, between the ill equipped Bosnian forces, the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Srpska Republic Army.

A beautiful graphic novel produced by Joe Kubert, records the horrors experienced by comic book editor Ervin Rustemagic, his wife and their children during the Siege. No one could leave the city without risking falling into the hands of serbs patrols or snipers.

The war was caused by a complex combination of political and religious factors: the nationalist fervor, political, social and security crises that followed the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism in the former Yugoslavia. Due to the involvement of neighbouring countries like Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro; there was a long debate over whether the conflict was a civil war or a war of aggression.

Most Bosnians, Croats, many Western politicians and human rights organizations claim that the war was a war of aggression based on the Karadorevo Agreement between Serbs and Croats, while Serbs generally consider it to be a civil war.

After having their house in the suburbs of Dobrinja bombed and losing their home and possessions – including a vast collection of originals by great illustrators from around the world – Ervin and his family seek survival from shelter to shelter in the devastated city. The editor manages to communicate with the outside world only through fax messages, in which he recounts the horror of war and genocide on European soil, which resulted in the death of more than thousands of Bosnians.

One of the recipients of these irregularly sent faxes was precisely Joe Kubert, who decided to narrate, based on the reports and images sent, the two and a half years of deprivation and fear that Ervin and his family went through, who escaped the war by fleeing to Slovenia.

Originally published in the United States in 1996 by Dark Horse, Fax de Sarajevo earned Kubert the Eisner and Harvey awards (1997), in addition to being voted the best international album at the Angoulême International Festival (1998).

Fax from Sarajevo is an incisive account of war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which rank among the bloodiest chapters in world history.

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Opening sequence : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1jBbq6zRo

The Lord of War was released in 2005, was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, and has in its cast Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto and Ethan Hawke.

Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian man who came with his younger brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), and their parents to the outskirts of the United States as a child, because of their fear of persecution by the Soviets.

Orlov has an epiphany when he finds himself in the middle of a shootout between Russian mobsters in the 1980’s.

From then on, he got into the business of arms trafficking, starting at the bottom (sales of used parts) and climbing to the top thanks to the arsenals left without owners by the dismantling of Soviet Union.

Orlov does this because he feels the need to have something more in his life, taking into consideration the reality that surrounds him ( lack of economic resources). He knows that what he is about to do is wrong and illegal, but the voice of money speaks louder and he allows himself to enter in this type of trade.

He grew rich due to the global political instability that generated potential clients for his activities due to the constant armed conflicts around the world. Yuri describes his experience, in a comical and reflective tone, that took him from anonymity to success.

I really like the movie, mainly because it is a sort of backstage on the wars.

Showing the real culprit for arming people in bankrupt countries with virtually no hope, and that the only thing they can do is kill each other with endless wars promoted by totalitarian and corrupt governments.

What I find the film relevant to my project is to show how everything that happens from disgraces involving war comes from an organism much bigger than a simple arms dealer. Which is the United States itself. Showing that they need to keep the arms dealers active, so that they can arm the conflicts, and justify the existence of the American weapons industry. And their interventionism politics around varied conflicts around the world. As Cage’s own character says “ A necessary evil”.

The reflection we can do is the following question : What kills ? The firearm or the man ? This is a reflection that Cage’s character make many times during the film. If his weapons are used for evil, that’s none of his business. He’s out there doing his job, doing what he thinks is right. When asked about stopping selling weapons so that wars end, he replies succinctly: “ If I don’t sell, someone else comes along and sells.”

The level of the work is reflected in its exceptional opening scene, where you follow, with great skill, the manufacture of a bullet. From its actual creation, from its housing in boxes and distribution by factions around the world, to dying in a weapon with the destination of a defenseless child’s head.

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Every child, according to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, “[…] is a human being under the age of 18” (CRC, 1989, p. 6). To ensure that childhood is a period of development, care, support and protection, the rights of the child must be followed and put into practice in any situation. Precisely because there is a convention in international law which covers the various countries of the globe so widely, all children should be under this protection that defends it in such a representative way. This is not what happens in practice. States that are currently in conflict end up developing their own improvised social “system”, in which it is not known how to proceed or organise society in the midst of chaos. With this disorder generated by conflicts, people who are on the margins of society face a profound abandonment, in which at the slightest sing of help, they surrender to the unknown.
This is the case of children when they are in situation of social precariousness. The recruitment of soldiers in the midst of decentralised armed conflicts can be criminal, and in this case, deeply repulsive. Child soldiers are in the midst of chaos, often kidnapped from their families’ homes, other times blackmailed for something as essential as food. In this sense, they find in the life of a soldier the only means for their survival.
The Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), for example is commonly known for abducting children from their homes. According to the 2008 global report on child soldiers, the LRA has abducted about 25.000 children since the 1980’s.
However, if children are not forcibly recruited, why do they decide to join armed groups and forces, apart from peer pressure ?
Whereas push factors first drive children away from their known environment, pull factors encourage them to join the fighting forces. Push factors include “grievances, repression and discrimination”. As well as poverty, lack of education and employment, and abuse at home.
They seek a security in fighting forces, provision of food, a sense of belonging and ideology or group identity.
A study on recruitment in Colombia, for example revealed that many children who voluntarily joined the revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were driven by “poverty, unemployment, vengeance, and the allure of military life.”
The purpose of my project is to show the different children affected by the wars around the globe. And how a child's innocence is ripped away when witnessing the horrors of war.
And if there is still some kind of hope for these children.

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Joe Sacco is a reference in comic books, and also in journalism. And he is quite good in mixing those two ideas together. He is also an author of books about the conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East, the war in Bosnia, the arrival of African refugees in Europe and the struggle of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Born in Malta, a group of islands south of Italy, and based on the United States, the journalist and comic artist has delivered, a career’s worth of first hand reportage from some of the world’s most hostile areas through his comic book aesthetic, portraying life in a war zone, with a beguiling humor that manages to camouflage some of the problems that these people go through.

He wanted to work with comic books since the High School, and he managed to work some years after he graduated. However after a number of dissatisfying stints working at publishing companies and small newspapers, joe’s frustration led him to Palestine in search for a more complete information. In 1991 and 1992 he spent time in the Gaza Strip and West Bank regions, drawing the stories of people he encountered.

And after so long collecting so many informations in the Gaza Strip and  the Palestines about their real situation, he published in 2001 his graphic novel "Palestine".

Sacco visited Palestine as an independent journalist, entered homes, made friends, met and spoke with the inhabitants of Gaza, Nablus, Rafah, Kalandia and various refugee camps. It is so important to remember the change in approach to Palestinians because Sacco initially had a very clear mission: to portray Palestinians as victims. Show their suffering, the abuse, the almost inhumane situation in which they live.

However, as he lives with these people and hears the same stories a million times over, Sacco’s feelings become more ambiguous: everyone was wrongfully arrested, even those affiliated with extremist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, yet, cars explode and buses are thrown from ravines. This does not escape the author. Neither do those who live in a big house, in the middle of a miserable refugee camp, and complain about economic impositions.

Sacco does not try to exclude himself from history, or disguise his prejudices: he is a westerner, an American, in an Islamic land, and he is uncomfortable with the position of women, the hatred expressed so openly. He wants to understand those people, but he can’t, he truly sympathizes with their suffering, but he still feels alienated, far removed from the reality of the people he talks to.

Palestine has been compared to Art Spielgelman Pulitzer Prize winner Maus for having the ability to navigate in social and political subjects matter.

Something that Joe does, and I really like it, is mainly mixing his illustrations with international politics. I've always tried to understand what's going on out there, I'm very interested in other civilizations and cultures, and many of these countries with a rich history are been swallowed by violence and corruption.

In addition to showing all sides of a conflict. Showing that there is no right and wrong in a war. As much as in fact the Palestinians do not have conditions to fight a war against Israel, extremist groups like Hamas, always promise something they cannot deliver and sacrifice thousands of people with their ideals. And at the same time, Israel displays its brutality against Palestinians, even those who are innocent civilians who are trying to live another day, simply because they are afraid of what they can do.

Something I think is important to bring to my work on child soldiers is that I will never understand what these people go through, what I can only do is sympathize with the situation and try to alert what is happening in several countries with these children. And try to tell a story with all the reports I heard about this situation.

Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best. Because after the success of Palestine, Sacco continued to write and draw several comics about different conflict zones and report what is happening there.

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Dave Mckean is an acclaimed British illustrator, known worldwide for the cover art created for the Sandman comic book series, by Neil Gaiman.

He was invited by 14-18 NOW publisher to produce a comic book about the First World War, where inspired by the life and work of Paul Nash.

Paul Nash was a surrealist painter and war artist, photographer, designer and writer. Essential in the development of modernism in British art, Paul produced some of the most iconic paintings of the First World War, inspired by his life as an army officer. In 1914 he enlisted as a corporal and then in 1916 he took an officer’s course. The following year, as a second lieutenant, he was posted to the western front.

Nash and his experience, in paintings, influenced by the time he fought the war, aged 25, to reflect on what can be definitive to change the human being: loss, pain and trauma.

Paul talks about his dreams and how a black dog was always around with a strong presence, especially when he was a kid. The animal becomes a figure of loss, especially after Paul’s mother died, interned in a psychiatric hospital.

The black dog also appears in several moments of the life of Paul Nash, who even talks to friends about it and wonders who would be the dog that live in his mind. Just a nightmare or a dark part of himself that lives in hiding ?

The perspective of life, death, violence are recurrent in Nash’s “dreams”. The horror of war does not have the Hollywood glamor, but s sincerity that reveals the marks of conflict in the painter.

McKean, explores a wide spectrum of techniques in this comic: famous for creating his paintings manually, photographing them and only then using computer programs for adjustments, and composition, dedicating chapters to pastel and pencil, oil painting and also collages.

I read this comic recently, mainly because I've been following McKean's work for a long time, in addition to the theme of the horrors of war. The work is influential for my main work because it has this surrealistic character, where I would like to put in my story, something more out of the box. I want to represent my character in very dark moments and how the environment starts to become distorted in his vision, as if it were a nightmare.

Also, perhaps the most important factor for my story is the presence of a mystical being in a very real environment. Which in the case of the comic would be the black dog that torments Nash. And in my story, it would be a rifle where the child soldier personifies this object, and makes the child do the most obscene acts. Mostly because this child soldier has been totally broken by the environment of war, and the rifle it is his own dark side. And the weapon starts to enter more and more in his fragile mind influencing his thoughts.

This true work of art deals with the memories of the real soldier, and all the stories told throughout the 15 parts that composes it represent overwhelming and moving events, showing how war and extreme situations can change us.

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Otto Dix was an important German expressionist painter of the 20th century. He also worked as a graphic artist. He stood out for his critical portrayal of European (mainly German) society during the 1st World War and in the years following its end.

Born in Gera, Germany, in 1891. After primary school he worked locally until 1910  when he became a student at Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. To help with his education, he accepted commissions and painted portraits of local people.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Dix volunteered for the German Army and was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden.

Dix was wounded several times during the war. On one occasion he nearly died when a shrapnel hit him in the neck.

He sketched many things in charcoal right there in the trenches, but it was only in 1924, six years after the catastrophe, that he wanted to expose a series of engravings about what he had seen in the war.

Also, it was in Goya that Dix had the most influence. Between 1810 and 1820, the Spanish painter represented a series of eighty-two engravings about the invasion of the Napoleonic army in his country, entitled the Disasters of War.

Even though they were in different times (a century apart) and in different locations ( Spain and Germany), what really interested both Goya and Dix was the way in which human beings, peaceful citizens, treat their fellow men and how a daily life of war and chaos transforms them into wild beings full of atrocities.

Dix concentrated on the manifestation of the consequences that war brings to the body of the individual and society. They are manifestations, which propagate externally in the civilizational nature. Dix presents us with a dynamic of destruction. A destruction not only physical, but a subjective destruction, which will devastate Germany after the conflict.

I recently got to know Dix's works through my teachers, and I found the way in which Dix represents the horrors of war with all its rot and filth that exists in this totally inhuman environment, is very interesting.

As my work is mainly about war, and the use of children in battle, I want to represent my drawings in the dirtiest way possible, to try to convey what an unpleasant place it is.

Charcoal is the perfect material to represent this, with all the dirt and smudges I can put in my drawings. With the idea of hiding my character’s face with the shadows, by showing that he or she no longer has a humanity when it is holding a gun. Something that Dix does in his engravings, showing that human beings, in moments of fear or despair, forget their basic instincts and transform themselves into something totally different from what we know, they become animals.

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For Whom the Bells Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 

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For Whom the Bells Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 

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For Whom the Bells Tolls is a novel that was published in 1940 by the American writer Ernest Hemingway and is considered one of his best works.

I read the book during the vacation, because I was becoming interested in the writing style and approaches of Hemingway's books. I had a first contact with perhaps his most famous work "The Old Man and the Sea".

And then I went to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is considered one of the best war books ever written, possessing a reflective and complex character on the nature of war.

The story tells of Robert Jordan, an American who was a professor of Spanish at a university in the United States, and who now lives in Spain, serving in the army as a dynamiter. His job in the book is to blow up a bridge and prevent the Republic’s enemies from getting help after they’ve been attacked. For this, Jordan goes to the mountains - where the bridge is - , and joins guerrillas in favor of the Republic to fulfill its mission.

The work portrays Robert Jordan’s mission  in the middle of the Spanish Civil War in the face of the impasses of the fight against fascism, the moral dilemmas of war, of individualist and collective interests; of tenacity in the struggle for ideals. It also portrays the mistakes made in the fight against fascists as a powerful warning about the human condition and the dilemma of war as the destruction of the others.

In the novel there is a long flashback scene, in which Pilar, one of the members of the guerrilla, reports the taking of a certain city and the death by beating of several fascists by resistance soldiers. At one point, Pilar shows how the guerrillas’ hatred becomes so intense that it makes her nauseous and the act of her peers becomes monstrous in her eyes. War make people brutal and in the name of ideas we commit ferocious crimes.

The question of when it is justifiable to kill a person becomes complicated when we read that several characters, admit to experiencing some kind of excitement while killing. Hemingway does not take a clear moral stance regarding when it is acceptable to take another person’s life. At times he even implies that killing can be exhilarating, which makes the morality of war in For Whom the Bell Tolls even murkier.

Each of the characters in For the Bells Tolls loses his or her psychological or physical innocence to the war. Some endure tangible traumas: Joaquin loses both his parents and is forced to grow up quickly, while Maria loses her psychical innocence when she is raped by a group of Fascist soldiers. One the top of these tangible, physical costs of war come many psychological costs. Robert Jordan initially came to Spain with idealism about the Republican cause and confidently believed that he was joining the good side. But after fighting in the war, Jordan becomes cynical about the Republican cause and loses much of his initial idealism.

Hemingway shows in the novel that morality is subjective and conditional, and that the sides of right and wrong are almost never clear. With no definite sides of right and wrong in For Whom the Bells Tolls, there is no sense of glorious victory in battle, no sense of triumph or satisfaction that good prevails and evil is defeated.

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In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops invaded Spain, an ally of the French, which was betrayed by them and suffered terrible consequences.

Francisco Goya recorded cruel moments of this war motivated, among other factors, by the revolt of the Spanish population against French invaders.

Goya never participated in a war as a soldier, but because he was very close to the front between peninsular soldiers and guerrillas and napoleonic soldiers, he witnessed many facts, even though he was not a war correspondent, but an elderly court painter at the time (62 years old) and with his poor health, he remained, simultaneously, close and distant from the conflict.

he created 82 different engravings released between 1810 and 1814. Goya drew and sketched several scenes of conflict, murder, torture, rape, which will later be transferred to the engravings. This series is called ‘Disasters of War’, which Goya portrays the horror of war and its fatal consequences. It does not praise the victories, but the banditry scenes of the French troops, the patriotism of the guerrillas and the cruelty perpetuated by both sides.

He probably created that series after his visit to Zaragoza, a city that was destroyed and besieged by the enemy. Goya collected numerous witnesses to the massacre, and they represent true facts. After a valiant resistance, Zaragoza fell in 1809 and its population was on the verge of collapse due to a typhus epidemic, caused by countless putrefied corpses that piled up in the streets of the city.

In the words of Goya himself “ War was not the heroic victory, but the defeat of men”.

I think it's interesting to use Goya's Guerra disasters as a reference, not just for showing the brutality of war. But to show his illustrations through reportages that he collected during this period.

My work is about the use of child soldiers in various wars around the world. As it is something very far from my reality and I cannot be there to know what it is like. What I'm going to do is collect news and reports that I hear through , even books.

And with that, I'm going to create a story about these testimonies and show a reality that is little publicized by the media, and the horrors these children go through.

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The book is about Afghanistan being taken over by the Taliban, and tells the story of Parvana.

Parvana is a girl who lives in Afghanistan. She is 11 years old, lives with her father, mother, sister Nooria, 17 years old, and her younger siblings Ali and Maryam, who is about four years old. Parvana had an older brother named Hossein, only he ended up dying in a mine. Her father was a history teacher, but with the military dictatorship in his country and the very brutal regime, a bomb fell inside the school room where her father worked, with that he ended up losing his leg and they ended up moving to Kabul.

Kabul being ruled by the Taliban, things are pretty complicated. All women, even children, were forbidden to leave the house. When this happens, they need to be in the company of a male member of the family and be covered with burqas. Working women ended up losing their jobs and girls no longer go to school. If a woman is caught alone, or without a burqa, she can be beaten, whipped or killed.

Her family’s situation, which was already precarious, worsened when her father was arrested by the Taliban without much explanation. Since neither the mother nor Parvana nor the sisters could leave the house, and the only male in the house was only two years old, the family had to improvise.

They had an idea of turning Parvana into a boy to continue her father’s work and thus support the family and she agreed.

Even scared to death of being of being caught by the Taliban, Parvana kept going, and even with all the difficulties and dangers, the girl still dreaming, about a world where she could live in peace with her family.

I first read the book during school when I was 14 years old. Little did I knew about what was happening in Afghanistan during the Taliban's oppressive and violent regime. And I found it interesting to reread after so many years , mostly because today I have much more knowledge about what the country had went through over the last forty years and its endless wars. And especially due to the Taliban rise to power in August 2021.

So unfortunately, the book is more current than ever. From the moment the group took over Kabul on August 15 2021, many woman feared the impact the new government would have - and, as time goes by, they would find that many of those fears would come true.

Afghan women are forced to wear a full face veil for the first time in decades following a new Taliban decree.

Any woman who refuses to abide by the new rule could see her male guardian jailed for three days.

Also, I think the book is important to my project because it shows a child's perspective on a horrible conflict, and her having to mature earlier to be able to survive a hostile environment. To save her family.

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These book is based on the thesis that the “West” invented the “East” through literary  and scientific exoticism. Western authors grouped distinct peoples and nations from North Africa, Arab countries, Persia (Iran today), and the Indian subcontinent into a single basket.

The works begins with the speech of British Politician Arthur Balfour justifying colonialism. Balfour condescends to the Naive character of “Orientals” while defending the civilizing mission of Europeans in Egypt.

Said demonstrates how the imagined geography of the Orient was constructed, initially with philological studies, then with fashions in the arts and literature, finally in the social sciences. This myth becomes a discourse that feeds imperialist and colonialist political decisions.

Behind this action prevailed the contrast between the “civilized” European people and those other Orientals who would need Europeans enlightenment to abandon bestial customs that distanced them from civilizations. Added to this notion, of man and landscape was designed from images of the so called Orient as a desert land, populated by individuals of a different morality, bearers of an uncontrollable sensuality ( which is even notorious mark of Orientalism art), constituting nothing more nor less than an exotic oasis ready to be conquered by the Western.

Throughout the work Said will demonstrate how this Other materiality and intellectually are important to consolidate the West. It will also demonstrate that there was never a counterpart. While Europeans (and later Americans) nurtured Orientalism in the Orient, there was no similar intellectual process. There is no Westernism produced by Arab intellectuals. Proof of this asymmetry is evident, for “ it has been estimated that about 60,000 books were written on the Near East between 1800 and 1950; there is no remotely comparable number of oriental books about the west. As a cultural apparatus, Orientalism is aggression, activity, judgment, persistence, and knowledge.”

Said seeks, at all time, to criticize the point of approach of intellectuals who summarized the East, Islam, Muslim, etc., in addition to pointing out the complexity that this region has. The author also makes it clear in his afterword written 15 years after its release, that his book is not an anti-Western work, emphasizing, as can be seen in this excerpt:

“ My objection to what I have called Orientalism is not that it is just the antiquated study of Oriental languages, societies, and peoples, but that, as a system of thought, it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist vantage point; this suggests both an enduring Eastern reality and an opposing but not less enduring Western essence that watches the Orient from afar, and, as it were, from above. This false position hides the historical change. Even more important, from my point of view, does it hide the interest of the Orientalist ? (p.443).

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Käthe Kollwitz was an important German artist, whose work reflects an eloquent vision of human conditions in the first half of the 20th century.

Supporting a dynamic art, her images bear the mark of humanity that bears the pains of the world. Its particular character - portraits of real situations - takes on a universal dimension thorough identification with its scrutinizing purpose, which brings it ever closer to its spectator. The refuse of the beauty of conventional art makes explicit Kollwitz’s vigor in contesting the contrasting social inequality.

The early loss of a son in World War I and a grandson in World War II further exacerbates Kollowitz’s pain and anguish at the inhumanity of the men and who wage war.

Women became the focus of her works, and she created prints and posters that celebrated revolutionary female figures leading the charge for social changes, as well as the resilience, trials, and perseverance of working class mother who were under the most dire of circumstances.

In the woodcut The Mothers (1922-1923), Kollwitz recovers the female image to show the consequences of war in the daily lives of people. The technique chosen provides robustness to the group of mothers who unite to protect their children. The children appear suffocated by the woman’s arms, hands and dresses. The tense looks, the furrowed brows, the embracing hands indicate the existence of oppression coming from all sides.

The attitude represented by Kollwitz indicates despair in the face of the possibility of death. The willingness to defend the lives of children in the face of the threat of war already represents a willingness to fight.

American art dealer, Carl Zigorosser, claims that her expressions were always true to her and her time. According to him, “the War cycle represented the woman’s reaction as a wife and to the war. During the development of the conception, through all the transmutations into drawings, engravings and lithographs, every irrelevant detail was abstracted, and finally emerged as a pure drama of emotional tension. It was particularly interwoven, plastic and monumental in form and universal feeling.” ( 1969, p.XIV).

I think Kollwitz’s work is very relevant,mainly because it shows the civilian side of the war. All they had to go through, and how to protect their children so that they weren’t affected by all the hostility that surrounded them.

Käthe Kollwitz manages to evoke both the questions of the feminine, as a general concept related to women in the art world and society, as well as the emotional and intimate side.

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Paul Nash was a surrealist painter and war artist, photographer, designer and writer. Essential in the development of modernism in British art, Paul produced some of the most iconic paintings of the First World War, inspired by his life in as an army officer. In 1914 he enlisted as a corporal and then in 1916 he took and officer’s course. The following year, he was posted to the western front in the Hampshire regiment.

Paul Nash enlisted in the army to fight in World War I, in one of the bombings that took place, the artist ended up getting injured, falling into a trench, but when he made sketches of things he ended up seeing at the front, even though his role although it was not a direct conflict, he was, most of the time, in a very high place and ended up seeing several scenes of war.

His visions emphasizes the gruesome effects warmongering and, hardly showing human beings, he manages to convey destruction and cruelty through burned forests, remains of junk, rubble and ghostly scenes, vacant after the battles. His oil paintings of war wanted the “violation of nature” to appear as the atrocious compendium of wars.

He expressed the loss of life through visions as dramatic as that of Wire (1919), an ashen landscape that smells of death, starring the skeleton of tree whose remains are swirled with barbed wire.

During this process of researching war artists, I managed to find several artists who talk about different aspects of the first world war. Otto Dix talks more about the destruction and carnage at the front involving the soldiers, who died in brutal ways. Käthe Kollwitz talks more about the civil side or the people, where she sees the despair mainly of mothers with their children in absurd and hopeless situations.

And Paul Nash represents the destruction of nature and the chaos propagated by the weapons of mass destruction. I find Nash extremely relevant to my work, mainly because he shows the effects of war on the environment around us, how war manages to destroy something so pure and beautiful, and turn everything into a scorched empty field.

Another important factor is also the surrealism present in his works, where in my story, I want to put elements that look like a nightmare, as if the character were in a completely destroyed environment with burnt trees and rubble all around him. As if the character was constantly walking through chaos, as if it were a real hell.

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George Butler is British award winning, artist and illustrator, who is specialized in reportage drawings, and it mainly addresses conflicts that currently occur, in countries of the Middle East,Africa and Asia especially.

His drawings have been published by The Times (London), New York Times, the Guardian, BBC and CNN.

Butler believes that reportage drawings can offer insight and value, and communicate in ways that photography cannot.

Butler traveled to refugee camps in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

What he always takes with him are some brushes of different sizes, ink , watercolor, leaves and a clipboard.

He had many stories from the refugee camps, like people sitting next to him and asking to show him around, and sometimes just observing him drawing.

He sad that this is the only way that he can get inspiration from,by sitting with someone, and trying to have connections with them.

When he arrived on Afghanistan in 2006 alongside with the British army, Butler had no experience in the War zone, and because of the Afghanistan conflict, he was restricted to draw only in the bases and surrounding areas. He thought that was perfect, because while the photographers were at the action zone, Butler drew British soldiers waiting to fight and interacting with each other.

He enjoyed doing that, because it made him forget about the restrictions of the studio or that all the drawings should turn out well.

In 2012 Butler went to Syria where he documented the conflict, the rebels and their way of life.

Destroyed houses, destroyed buildings and roads where conflicts have taken place, were where Butler went most of the time. Also children playing on abandoned tanks and people walking around on the streets.

I find it interesting how Butler manages to create such beautiful and vivid paintings and illustrations of such terrible moments.
As he captures certain moments of a completely destroyed scene and he uses few colors.

But what I think is most relevant to my work is showing how in a war those who suffer the most consequences are mainly civilians. Where they are forced to live in a hostile environment without many conditions and without knowing what might happen the next day.

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https://amp.elperiodico.com/es/cuaderno/20200215/hablan-ninos-soldado-colombia-7845436

“I would tell society not to exclude us. We are human beings who have made mistakes, like almost everyone. And that we need a second chance, that doesn’t deny to us”, claims Alejandro, 19 years old. He spent four and a half years in FARC.

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The civil war faced by Colombia in 1964 started with minor conflicts without solution, in which the population ended up suffering the consequences of living in an environment in a state of alert for many years. The dispute for power in the country provoked an emblematic dead end rivalry, on the one hand conservatives, of the forces of socialist nature inspired by communist movements, also recurrent in neighboring countries, but neither side has definitively triumphed since the 1960s.

The FARC was a communist organization, inspired by Marxist - Leninist tactics, which operated through guerrillas, in which the main objective would be the implantation of socialism in Colombia.

From that moment on, several armed guerrilla groups emerged, which objectified their conflicts in the struggle for territory, against the Colombian government, other paramilitary groups and drug dealers in the region. The FARC defined itself as a paramilitary guerrilla movement and, as its peak in 2001, had between 6,000 and 16,000 members. According to an interview with the group conducted by Raul Reyes, the numbers are even higher, reaching 18,000 members.

Approximately 30% of the soldiers recruited by the FARC are under the age of 18. The search for minors by the guerrilla group is due to the ease that the child has to be molded, to be taught according to the way in which the leaders want. In addition to the various other unhealthy issues these children go through, where they see life as a solider as a kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

The recruitment of child soldiers in Colombia by guerrillas, paramilitaries and armed groups is a policy designed to control the population, as it affects an extremely vulnerable population in the social sphere. The vast majority of children recruited to act directly in armed conflicts enter this environment voluntarily.

In Colombia, most of the minors involved in armed conflicts come from families in extreme poverty, have some level of malnutrition, have been directly affected by some type of violence and have suffered the loss of a close relative. The vast majority also come from the rural areas of country, and about 15% of the children have never registered in a school (SPRINGER, 2012, p.22).

The reason for the guerrillas to recruit children from the rural area would be that the child would be easier to adapt and live in the jungle, in addition to being more resistant to diseases. The group lure children through promises and money, and describe life in the countryside as a great adventure, in which the gains would be incomparable with the previous life. They also promise the children and their families that they can leave the group whenever they want, which rarely happens.

It is much easier for a developing being to be dehumanized than for an adult. Intimidating a child to achieve absolute obedience is a process of ideological conversion, in which groups see children as an opportunity to mold them according to their war goals.

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A illustrator, graphic designer and film director.

She enjoys free flowing illustration and graphic

designing and has designed album covers for

musicians like 50 cents, Kanye, etc.

Her website is very well displayed, because she

divides her type of work into categories. As

illustrations, experiments and movies. And

when you click on illustration, for example, you

will also have your illustrations divided into

categories. This is something I try to do in my

work, which is to divide my projects into

categories, so that it's not all crammed into a

single page.