This is the most exciting project I've ever been involved in. It took me and my partners(Cocoaspen and Marta Nael) 3 years to finish since the very first conception of it until having the book in our hands, to be honest the whole process was a pain in the ass but in the end every second that we spent worthed it.
By 2010 Jorge Monreal, more known as Cocoaspen, and I were really into the deviantart.com community and though how great would it be to have a group only for spanish people (inside that community), in order to stablish a network of spanish speakers to help each other, share knowledge and make friends. We decided to create it and it all started as a joke but, in 2 weeks the group already had 500 members, and we started to freak out. Within the first year we almost had gathered 2000 members and we were amazed by the high quality of the works of the members from the group, it was amazing.
We kept really involved into the group tasks, even we had to ask for help to some contributors because a lot of works were being upload every day and we needed help to stablish kind of a quality filter.
In the second year of the group we almost got 3000 active artists into it. And we started to think more seriously about how great would be to make a book gathering such big talents. I started to do some research about all the economical stuff. It was hard to take but, we wouldn't make, it was too expensive for us to invest that huge amount of money, a money that we didn't have. Even working and saving money it would take us too long to gather all the money. So we dropped off into the idea of making the book. But then Jorge by his own talked to Vicente, the main head of Ediciones Babylon, whom agreed to create this masterpiece because he's a lover of spanish artists and believed that this chance to showcase such amount of talented people couldn't pass by him without helping at all.
We opened the submission period. We recieved too many submissions, we didn't expect that many, it was overwelming. Once it was closed we had to make diferent stages to pick up the works because dispite we would have loved to put all of them into a book, we had a briefing to achieve. The criteria of selection was set by creativity, resolution and concept. We spent several nights gathered to short this out. After it we ended up with 165 artists and 255 works.
But the worst was yet to come. I though I had a powerful computer until I saw myselft with a file inside of which I had 165 high quality TIFF files, that was crazy! My computer could hardly manage the file. Also some of the accounts that we had to recieve all the originals were blocked by Gmail because they said they had too much activity per day. We had to short out that too in order not to loose all the information we had into those email accounts.
I could be writing more and more things for hours but I think it's enough!
After all it was a regarding experience :)
Thank you very much to all of you, the ones who participated into the book and the ones who made it possible. Specially to Jorge and Marta because this was a long way together and at some point it was too hard to handle, but finally we made it <3
If you are interested in buying this book you can do so here for only 17,95€:
http://tienda.edicionesbabylon.es/es/libros/2366-libro-s.html
