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This blog is intended for people who would like to know more about the artist, some cool factoids about ReDCroW design and who is the man behind the curtain. Read further and find out!
ReDCroW Video
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My early years.
My name is Armando and I am the founder and the mind behind ReDCroW design. I was born in the city of Moscow, Russia in december, 1981. I grew up in a lower-middle class family environment. My father is a mathematical physicist and my mother is an artist. Due to my father's job we had to move to mexico when I was 6; we settled down in the city of Puebla. Since I was a little kid I always loved the obscure, the dark, the sinister and the strange: I used to spend hours in front of a records store staring at the record covers with demons, ghouls and apocaliptic scenes on them. Later in school I would scribble skulls and monsters on my notebooks in class. Nobody really understood or incouraged this strange fascination with the macabre while I was young. In fact most people, including my parents, school mates and teachers were scared of my sick drawings.
As a teenager my taste for this dark stuff grew and I started drawing comics and sell them to my close friends in school. At home, however, I had to hide my drawings from my mother who widely disapproved this 'abominations'. In those days my mother was an art history teacher at a local school so I learned a lot of theory and techniques from her.
I never went to the university but that didn't stop me from learning new things. On every chance I had, I read books or surfed the internet to learn new stuff; as a self-taught person I learned many things myself just investigating how things work or what the materials that I work with are made of. From time to time I attended courses in diferent schools to learn new techniques. Soon my knowledge spread to a wide range of topics like chemistry, phisics, the supernatural, literature, music, anatomy, history, programing and many other things. All those things made my art grow too and made it richer.
In 2001 I met my actual wife and that single event made me advance huge leaps in my art because she was one of the first persons who supported it. Since then I began growing as an artist much more than what I did in my entire life, most of what you see in my portfolio was done after I met her.
Behind the screams.
Analog art

I spent most of my early artistic life drawing comic and cartoon characters; one of my favorites was 'Jack McKane', a bizzarre zombie cowboy with razor-sharp retractable claws like wolverine's. Even though the character and the comic were all wrong, there was this guy who bought every single number (I made about 10 numbers or so).
In those days, I found and experimented with two things that marked my artistic career in a good sense; one of them was papier mâché. The other thing is epoxy putty with which I made my first necklaces. Since then, I use those two materials for most of my works. Another material I used a lot was leather, and not many people know that, because I included leather articles in my portfolio for less than 6 months, but I've done hundreds of designs in leather, specially pyrographed leather.
One of my first sources of inspiration, although unconscious, were Michael Whelan's illustrations for the covers for Sepultura, and the record covers of other metal bands. Then I saw H. R. Giger's paintings somewhere and I was blown away. Another thing that influenced me a lot was a job I had at a videogame rental store. I saw many titles there; my favorites were of course the dark/gothic ones but I was rather more interested in unknown titles, mostly for the PC. Imagery from games like Hexen, Blood, the Duke Nukem series, Carmageddon and Resident Evil had a very deep influence in me.
My most ambicious job was a biomechanic style showcase that I did for a local shop years ago. I had to do so much research for this that at the end of the day my eyeballs burned from reading so much. First I read several books about H. R. Giger that my friend Ivan had the kindness to borow me, and then I read various articles on how to make structurally stable stuff. The most challenging part was the fiberglass, because I had never worked with anything like that before so I was totally scared! The project was so big that I had to 'hire' a helper to do it.
I must confess that I didn't do the math when I propposed the project to the owners of the shop, so I charged too little for it and when I realised I was being crushed under the budget. Then we had the worst conditions while were working on it: rain, wind, cold… everything was awful, the fiberglass took almost 5 times more to cure and the strong rain sometimes washed away the resin so we spent twice the money we planned to spend on fiberglass and resin, and we spent thrice as much time as we were planning to. In the end, we earned 150 dollars each for working 4 months, 10 hours a day and with horrible weather conditions. On the bright side I think I learned a lot of things while working on this project, such as the chemical reactions involved in the polyester resin curing, how to work with fiberglass and stuff like that.
Finally, I would like to talk about the things to come, but I really don't know: life comes and goes, goes up and goes down and who knows what material I’m gonna end up working with tomorrow. I began working with garbage, shoeboxes, cans and those styrofoam bits that come with electronic equipment, so I think I can do anything with whatever I find. Keep an eye on ReDCroW, as there may be more surprises to come.
The Digital imaging and CGI.
I was one of those kids who are always getting bored hearing the teacher's class so, while the teacher was talking, I used to animate stick men fighting to death in my dictionary, drawing each individual frame on the empty strip of the dictionary pages so when you shuffle the pages all those drawings would come to life. You may call it the grandfather of today's violent flash animations. And that's how I started my graphic design career. When the dictionary wasn't enough to hold those twisted animations (because I ran out of space), I just moved to PC and started doing this animations in Animator for MS-DOS. In 1998 I encountered digital manipulation programs; back in those days all I could find for a decent price was a second hand version of corel draw 4 and I started to do my first computer generated images with photopaint.
In my spare time I used to do game Mods in the PC. It began as a sort of accident when I downloaded a demo version of Carmageddon. I didn't had the money to buy the full version, so I downloaded the tools from Internet and changed a few characters, cars, buildings, sounds and parts of the interface and it became sort of a new game. I liked it and later I did the same with Duke Nukem 3D, Quake II and every game I had the chance to play. Somehow the game modding was some sort of booster for my natural abilities.
To be honest, I don't know what else to write about this because I actually said all I had to say, as with the sculptures there is a lot of history and a lot of work behind it but I think that my work speaks for itself. I am a very demanding person when it comes to works and I like it and if I like it I believe that many more people could like it
Factoids
Many people ask me how did you do this? how did you do that? was that a photograph or a CGI? Well, I can't do a F.A.Q. to answer all that people ask me but what I can do is tell you some amusing facts about some of my works.
Mother of extermination
There were 3 diferent versions of this nifty sculture with 3 diferent names. In the beginning it was going to be a lava lamp but after investigating all the possibilities I realized that it could explode in a huge ball of fire and shrapnel could kill someone. So I thought in this queer looking 'Roswell' style lamp. Its original name was 'alien fetus' and it had a Plexiglas container full of this slimy substance called gel wax and in it was immersed a cute alien fetus. To this point I had already ruined a base and some gallons of wax. Everybody loved that lamp but not me, every time I used to turn on the 40 watts light bulb the wax warmed up and the fetus was sinking more and more, until one day I noticed that it was right in the bottom just from the exposure to the sun.
I decided to re-do the lamp but this time I used epoxy resin because it produces less heat while it cures. I re-made the fetus, gave more details to its body and put it in the resin. I renamed it 'alien mommy'.
Unfortunately due to some mistakes in my calculations the resin hardened terribly wrong and cracks and bubbles formed all over the piece and spoiled 3 weeks of hard work. I dumped the project for the second time and made several other works but this lamp was just bothering me so I started this project for the third time, but this time I wasn't letting it go so easy so I chose the easiest way: water, dye and glass. And after some quality tests it was finished. Its final name is 'mother of extermination'
The book of the dead names
This book was actually another version of the necronomicon that appears in the movie Evil Dead. After thinking about it a little I decided to do my own version.
The ultimate evil
I started this project a long time ago. This was going to be a gargoyle for the owner of a haunted props store in the US. I had already finished the skeleton and muscles and had covered them with a special mixture of plaster and paste. However, I forgot that the papier maché that I use tends to shrink almost 15% of it's size when it dries, so all the work with plaster virtually began to fall to pieces. Then I realised that the heavy papier maché muscle layer wasn't dry at all, just the surface, so I had to let it dry for months constantly checking its evolution through a tiny hole made in the heviest layer.
My economical situation was getting uglier and I was paying the construction of this sculpture with my own means so I had to abort it and put it in the crap storage.
I found the sculpture later and I decided to finish it once and for all; I took whatever I found in my materials box and bought some others. Since this sculpture was going to be made specially to make a mold and then cast duplicates I think that the person who wanted it doesn't want it anymore so I decided to give it another appearance.
 
ReDCroW evolution?
Stuff evolves... our crow? it evolves TOO!

2009
2008

American Rotting and American Rottage
Both names happen to be from the same painting. This rather obscure version of Grant Wood's american gothic was sold to Tim Turner from theghoulishgallery.com, who renamed it.

The cornfield a.k.a. The scarecrow
As normal as it may seem, this character is actually me in a very bad day. I was just kidding, but there is some thruth there. You see, this character's body is actually mine: the trenchcoat that the scarecrow is wearing was actually photographed on me; I was wearing a denim trenchcoat which I designed for my personal use. In case you wonder, yes, I also design clothes.
The zombiefans logo
This logo was going to be made with just one font: 'riot act', actually you can download that one from 1001fonts.com in dark fonts section I think. Anyway, I was not very conviced by using a font made by someone else for this particular logo, so I did my own font using Arial as a starting point.
The unseen!
For the first time you are going to witness some of my never-before-seen sketches. Enjoy.
 
My special thanks to Bob Meza my editor and to my wife Alexandra who is always inspiring me to go ahead.