Where others have become obsessed with speed and trends, Sergio Membrillas has built a career on slowing down and staying true to his craft. Over 13 years as a professional illustrator, he's evolved a distinct style – bold, graphic, and quietly playful – that feels both timeless and entirely his own. But this evolution, as he's quick to point out, wasn't something he forced. "I believe evolution is essential for every artist," Sergio reflects. "Change is not something I resist; it's something I enjoy and welcome as part of the creative journey." His work, initially influenced by a love of Mid-Century graphic design, has gradually absorbed references as diverse as Etruscan art, Mesopotamian motifs, and early 20th-century traditional tattoos. It's a portfolio built on curiosity, not conformity. Despite his stylistic clarity, Sergio's process remains refreshingly analogue at its core. He still begins each project with pencil and paper, leaning into the tactility of drawing by hand. "I've always valued having a physical relationship with art," he says. "There's something essential about feeling the wood of the pencil, manually erasing mistakes, rather than simply double-tapping a screen." His philosophy of working slowly, attentively, and with purpose shows in the balanced compositions and confident use of negative space that has become his signature. Sergio credits his background in graphic design for this instinctive sense of structure. "There has always been a strong graphic sensibility within me," he says, noting that the discipline of design continues to inform his illustration practice, particularly in editorial and poster work where clarity and storytelling must co-exist. Yet, like many creative careers, his path into illustration wasn't plotted from the start. Initially, Sergio imagined illustration would complement his design projects, not become the main event. "At first, I thought I would incorporate my illustrations into my graphic design projects – but in the end, it turned out to be the other way around." A commission for EasyJet's in-flight magazine marked a pivotal moment that reframed illustration from a hobby to a profession. "It made me realize that being an illustrator is a real profession, just like any other." Fast-forward to today, and Sergio's client list reads like a who's who of publishing and design, from The New Yorker to Pentagram. While the calibre of collaborators has changed, what matters most remains the same: trust. "When a client trusts your work and approaches projects with an open mind, collaboration flourishes," he says. It's in these open, trusting relationships that Sergio finds the space to experiment and further develop his ideas. Unsurprisingly, editorial work holds a special place for him. "Editorial projects offer wider creative margins, allowing for greater flexibility and innovation," he explains. Compared to the tighter confines of advertising, editorial illustration offers the opportunity to tell nuanced stories, and Sergio is clear that he views every assignment, regardless of format, as a collaborative effort. If one thing is clear, though, it's that he's not that he's afraid to say no when needed. Maintaining a strong personal voice is non-negotiable. "I always strive to stay true to myself and ensure that every project I undertake reflects a clear personal signature," he says. For Sergio, authenticity isn't just a matter of artistic pride; it's what differentiates an illustrator in a saturated, increasingly automated industry. Valencia is home for Sergio, a city he credits with much of his creative energy. "Oh, Valencia! It's a beautiful city that inspires me and brings me joy," he says, describing it as a European cousin to Los Angeles with its sun-soaked streets and vibrant cultural scene. The blend of tradition and modernity fuels his practice, offering constant inspiration without the sensory overload that often accompanies larger creative hubs. Given the pressure many creatives feel to keep pace with shifting trends, Sergio's approach feels almost radical. "I'm not particularly interested in trends," he says. "What truly matters to me is the feeling of having done something meaningful and fulfilling by the end of the day." Instead of chasing what's fashionable, he draws inspiration from a surprisingly eclectic bookshelf, mixing everything from Wim Crouwel's graphic design classics to studies on Scandinavian tattoos and Alec Soth's photography. It's a reminder that fresh ideas rarely come from looking where everyone else is looking. In the era of AI and content overload, the role of the illustrator is changing, but Sergio remains optimistic. While machine learning might churn out images at record speed, it can't replicate the nuance and emotional intelligence that underpin great illustration. "Illustrators can tell stories, evoke emotions, and create meaningful connections that machines simply cannot replicate," he says. "Our role is shifting, but the value of authentic, thoughtful illustration remains indispensable." That insistence on authenticity carries through to the advice he offers younger illustrators navigating a commercial landscape. "Create work that makes you happy when you go to sleep at night," Sergio advises. "It's important to find projects that align with your values and passions so your artistic voice remains authentic." It's an ethos that has carried him through more than a decade of creative highs and industry shifts. Perhaps it's the real secret behind the clarity of his practice, which he has built not on chasing trends or algorithms but on careful craft, deliberate evolution, and the simple, enduring joy of a well-made pencil and a blank piece of paper. #sergio #membrillas #art #staying #true

Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman | Dutton | The expression “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” is meant to convey a sense of futility, of meaningless action in the face of catastrophe, but I have been thinking recently of how it might be turned on its head, reimagined as a small gesture of purpose, of good work left to be done aboard that superlative metaphor for capitalist overabundance and technological hubris. I concede, it is not a perfect thought exercise, nor one nearly so elegant as those often deployed in the writing of the environmental journalist Alan Weisman, but I keep returning to it as I read Hope Dies Last, his final installment in a trilogy that also includes The World Without Usand Countdown. Weisman has an acumen for moving fluidly between a cataclysmic big picture and intimate first-hand accounts of its impact and his rigorously researched storytelling is well-suited to the challenge of writing about a phenomenon as vastly incomprehensible as climate collapse. “We can’t picture 6,780 pyramids of Giza,” Weisman writes, so it is hard to visualize the 40 million tons of carbon humanity produces each year, but we can start to comprehend its impact through the stories of the people on the ground trying to do something about it—engineers at work restoring Mesopotamian wetlands in Iraq or plasma physicists developing commercial-scale fusion power at MIT. There are architects in this book too—including projects in the Korean DMZ by Bijoy Jain, Shigeru Ban, Seung H-Sang, and Minsuk Cho, and a Bjarke Ingels’ proposal for a floating city in Busan inspired by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao—but Hope Dies Last’s immediate relevance to readers of this publication may have more to do with a statistic familiar to these pages, the 40 percent of global greenhouse emissions for which the construction industry is responsible. Our ecological crisis is, at least in part, a byproduct of our built environment.Weisman writes about that built environment beautifully. His description of the natural world’s ruthless repossession of a post-human Manhattan in the third chapter of The World Without Us is a small masterpiece of infrastructural prose. Many moments in Hope Dies Last, including a description of the massive network of dams, dikes, locks, levees, and storm surge barriers that comprise the Netherland’s Delta Works, are equally compelling. When COVID-19 locked much of humanity indoors, Weisman was seen as something of a visionary, but what makes his writing so griping is less his sweeping prognostications than his doggedly pragmatic realism. We cannot begin to address our climate crisis without looking rationally at and learning from its myriad constituent parts. The Netherlands’ methodically planned Delta Works, for example, cost less than a tenth of what the U.S. paid to clean up after hurricane Katrina. We need to be smarter about how we build. We also need to build less. Weisman’s second book, Countdown was a study of a central logical fallacy of late capitalism—that technology can solve for the impossibility of infinite population growth on a planet with very finite resources. We don’t like to talk about population control because it can feel coercive or contrary to our values but placing faith in technology to solve for unlimited human growth is lunacy. The same may be said of our hugely energy-intensive development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. A future edition of Countdown might include in its preface the 2023 story of a Belgian man despondent over the climate crisis, who committed suicide after a conversation with a chatbot that arrived at the logical conclusion that most impactful thing he could do to save the earth would be to remove the burden he placed upon it. The environmental outlook is far worse now than when Weisman began his career; the message at the core of Hope Dies Last is more somber than the two books that preceded it. Hope is not an expression Weisman uses lightly. Early in the book he unpacks the foreboding that lingers within a word that conveys an emotion more powerful than optimism precisely because it also carries a tinge of doubt. Hope, he notes, is a word that struggles against itself. That struggle is compounded by the uncomfortable truth of the astonishingly destructive work that has been done in the weeks since Hope Dies Last went to press. Even my advance copy has begun to feel outdated as I watch the current administration slam the door on so many small last best hopes. Yet, there is still work to be done and much of it by the people who think about how we build the world around us. In the words of a naturalist named Rosario whom Weisman meets while she is helping to clear the beach of plastic bottles during a turtle census in the Yucatán: “It’s a lost cause, but we do it anyway.” Justin Beal is an artist and author based in New York. His first book, Sandfuture, was published by MIT Press in 2021. He teaches at Hunter College and the Yale School of Architecture. This post contains affiliate links. AN may have a commission if you make a purchase through these links. #third #installment #alan #weismans #trilogy

Cool Finds Archaeologists Unearth an Ancient Relief Depicting an Assyrian King and Rare Deities The artifact was found in Mosul, Iraq, buried in the ancient city of Nineveh Researchers found the stone slab broken and buried in an ancient throne room. Aaron Schmitt In the ruins of the ancient Assyrian metropolis Nineveh, in modern Iraq, researchers have unearthed a rare artifact: a massive stone relief depicting important deities and Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrian empire that dominated northern Mesopotamia between the 14th and 6th century B.C.E. Nineveh, located in Mosul in northern Iraq, was the Assyrian empire’s urban center, and archaeologists have been researching the site for centuries. In the late 1800s, British researchers explored the city’s North Palace, which was built during Ashurbanipal’s reign, between 668 and 627 B.C.E., and found some large, detailed reliefs. But they didn’t find them all. Since 2022, Aaron Schmitt, an archaeologist at Heidelberg University in Germany, has been leading an excavation of the North Palace. It was beneath the palace’s throne room that his team recently unearthed the rare stone slab carved with the likeness of King Ashurbanipal, as well as two Mesopotamian deities—Ashur, Assyria’s national god, and Ishtar, the goddess of war and sex. Today, Nineveh is surrounded by the Iraqi city of Mosul. Aaron Schmitt “Among the many relief images of Assyrian palaces we know of, there are no depictions of major deities,” Schmitt says in a statement from the university. Though found in broken fragments, the 12-ton relief once measured 18 feet long and nearly 10 feet tall. Researchers have concluded it was carved in the seventh century B.C.E. and originally placed in a niche across from the throne room’s entrance. Likely during the third or second century B.C.E., the relief was mysteriously broken and buried in a pit behind the niche, per the statement. “We have no information on the reasons that led to the relief being buried,” Schmitt tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove. “This is quite enigmatic.” At the center of the relief is King Ashurbanipal, with Ashur and Ishtar at his sides. The gods are flanked by fish and scorpion deities. The presence of the latter figures suggest a “massive winged sun disk was originally mounted above the relief,” Schmitt says in the statement. The researchers created a 3D model of the carved slab, digitally adding a reconstruction of its missing left section. A 3D model of the relief portrays the found pieces in dark grey and a speculative reconstruction of the missing piece in light grey. MIchael Rummel Assyria began as a dependency of Babylonia, but it became an independent state in the 14th century B.C.E., some 3,000 years ago, and grew into a major regional power in the historic Middle East. Nineveh, on the banks of the Tigris River, entered a golden age under Assyrian king Sennacherib, who made the city his capital before dying in 681 B.C.E. Later, Ashurbanipal established Mesopotamia’s first organized library in Nineveh. A few decades after Ashurbanipal’s death, the Assyrian empire fell. And several centuries after that, Nineveh was likely settled by Greeks, who may have broken and buried the newly discovered relief. But as Schmitt tells Live Science, Nineveh’s Hellenistic period isn’t well documented. “We do not know if they were negatively disposed towards the Assyrian king and the Assyrian gods,” Schmitt says. “I hope we will be able to get a clearer picture through our future excavations.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. #archaeologists #unearth #ancient #relief #depicting

In 2022, archeologists unearthed what appeared to be the oldest intact reed boat. It was found buried in a sediment-filled former channel of the Euphrates River, near the ancient city of Uruk, in the Mesopotamian floodplain of what is now Iraq.“The findings provide valuable insights into the utilization of Uruk's waterways, the evolution of its floodplain, and the broader processes that shaped early urbanization in Mesopotamia,” according to the conference paper.Analyzing the Ancient BoatAlthough the researchers had a rough estimate of the era the boat probably hailed from, they had difficulty giving it a more exact date, because its materials were contaminated by bitumen.So, a group of scientists from the German Archaeological Institute turned to different technique, they explained when they announced the boat’s age at a European Geosciences Union meeting. They tapped into multiple materials surrounding it, rather than dating the reeds themselves.“The excavation revealed that the boat was embedded in sand layers, surrounded by fine-grained floodplain sediments that are rich in artifacts and faunal remains,” according to the paper.Understanding the Boat's AgeThat collection of clues meant they could use multiple methods to home in on the boat’s age. On the sediment, they applied a technique to determine when it was last exposed to sunlight. On the bone fragments, they turned to the radiocarbon dating that they had originally intended to perform on the boat itself. And on the ceramic fragments, they used several pieces of archeological evidence to see where they fit on the timeline.Taken together, these pieces of evidence put the boat’s age at about 3,600 hundred years — give or take a few hundred years in either direction. Knowing the boat’s age allows archeologists to put it into context with other discoveries from that era.Mesopotamia SocietyRemnants of comparable craft have been found in Kuwait and Egypt. But unlike them, this Mesopotamian boat remains relatively intact. Archeologists are considering restoring it, but few, if any people, have expertise.Although Mesopotamia, often called the “Cradle of Civilization” is well studied — from the frequency its citizens kissed to the way they recorded business transactions — many mysteries remain — including why its society faded away.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:EGU General Assembly 2025. Timing of the First Mesopotamian Boat Unearthed in a Euphrates Paleochannel near Uruk (Iraq)Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American. Source: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/a-3-600-year-old-reed-boat-provides-clues-to-early-urbanization-in #3600yearold #reed #boat #provides #clues #early #urbanization #mesopotamia