Braviera — VR sculpture from Panama City

Hands instead of a mouse

Most 3D work still gets built the same way it has for thirty years: a mouse pushing a cursor around a flat screen, translating two-dimensional motion into a three-dimensional model one click at a time. Braviera works differently. He puts on a VR headset and sculpts with his hands in open space, the way a ceramicist works clay on a wheel rather than the way an architect draws a floor plan.

“Virtual reality is a medium I find fascinating for its duality: profoundly artificial and plastic, yet surprisingly human. By using hands as the primary tool instead of a mouse, I feel like I am sculpting in a virtual space that blends the traditional with the digital, transforming every gesture into a form of contemporary craftsmanship.”

That description — his own — explains the look of the work better than any technical breakdown could. The figures in his catalogue have the slightly uneven roundness of something pressed into shape by fingers rather than calculated by a spline tool: a purple figure with a spray can leans forward at an angle no rig would default to; a mascot's ears sit just slightly asymmetrical, the kind of imperfection that comes from a hand deciding "that's enough" rather than a symmetry modifier deciding for it.

From Cali to Panama City

Braviera was born in 2000 in Cali, Colombia, and is now based in Panama City. He graduated in Digital Animation from Universidad Latina de Panamá in 2024 — a formal training in the same discipline he has since bent toward a much more physical, improvisational process. Panama shows up in the work directly: one of the three decks in the deckarts catalogue, Panama Access Memory, is explicitly a collage of his own memories of growing up in the city — aliens, CDs, and a recurring character he calls El Kid, assembled the way a memory actually surfaces: in fragments, not in order.

The other two decks work the same instinct from different angles. Pelaito takes its title from Panamanian slang for a young boy or kid, usually said with affection — fitting for a purple, spray-can-wielding figure that reads as mischievous rather than menacing despite its scowl. Weird is Cool states its thesis in the title: a piece about individuality and the courage to look different, done in a visual language that itself refuses to look like anything mass-produced.

Warp Records, Four Loko, and a festival for 15,000

The client list moved fast past student work. Braviera has directed 3D pieces for Warp Records — on a project connected to Hudson Mohawke — as well as for Four Loko and Warner Music Group, three names that don't typically hand 3D direction to someone still early in a career unless the work is doing something a conventional pipeline can't. He has also built the identity and visuals for Macrofest, a Panama City festival that draws more than 15,000 attendees, and for Panama Fashion Week.

Panama Fashion Week and Four Loko — two very different briefs, the same tactile, hand-built figures.

From gallery wall to Panama Fashion Week

Commercial work runs alongside a steady exhibition record. His solo show, Volver a ser niños ("Becoming children again"), opened at Liquid in Panama City in 2024 — a title that lines up with his own description of the work returning again and again to the colours and textures of childhood. He has spoken about his process at the Panama American Center and at Universidad de Panamá, both in 2025, and at Panamá's Feria del Libro in 2024.

2026 has been a busy year for exhibitions specifically: his work is showing at Vision World in Huesca, Spain, and at Umbral Galería in Bogotá, curated by Christian Padilla, alongside a place in Pinta Art Week and a return to Macrofest. Further back, in 2020, his work was included at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles.

Three pieces, one deck format

Translating VR sculpture onto an 85 × 20 cm maple deck is not a neutral move. A VR piece exists to be walked around; a deck exists to be looked at from one angle, on a wall, at a fixed distance. What survives that translation in Braviera's case is the tactility — the rounded, slightly uneven forms still read as sculpted rather than drawn even flattened onto a single print, because the modelling itself carries the evidence of a hand.

The full portfolio lives at braviera.net, with a VR sculpture reel on Vimeo, plus Instagram and Behance. See the full range on the Braviera collection page.

Michael David Walrond — analog portraits from Seattle

What stays in the frame

Most portrait photography made today, even a lot of what calls itself "film-inspired," is shot digitally and pushed through a filter afterward to fake the texture of film. Michael David Walrond shoots the actual thing — 35mm, on a Leica Dlux and a Canon AE-1 — which means the grain, the blur, the uneven light and the occasional light leak aren't a style choice applied in post. They're what the film recorded, full stop, and the work is built around keeping that rather than cleaning it up.

That commitment shows most clearly in the three decks now in the deckarts catalogue. Absorption is described by the artist himself as an experimental 35mm portrait — shot to lean into grain and shadow rather than smooth them away. While You Were Dreaming takes the same approach and adds a red light source, giving the whole frame the half-conscious, saturated mood its title promises. In Praise of Shadows – Mirage Portrait sits with shadow and half-light rather than resolving them into a clean, literal read — a portrait that asks to be looked at rather than simply seen.

Absorption and In Praise of Shadows — Mirage Portrait, shot within the same experimental 35mm practice.

San Diego, New York, and the page

Walrond is self-taught, which in analog photography usually means a longer, more expensive process of trial and error than digital work forgives — every mistake costs a roll of film rather than an undo click. That process has shown in solo exhibitions in San Diego and New York, putting the physical prints in front of a room rather than only a feed.

The work has also been published across a spread of photography and lifestyle titles: P Magazine, Osphilia, Others Magazine, Lomography, Artizians Magazine and Supersonic Art. Lomography in particular is a specific signal — it's a publication built around and for the analog and toy-camera photography community, not a general lifestyle outlet, and being featured there says something about where his work sits inside that world specifically.

Seven years, one anthology

In October 2023, Snap Collective published Walrond's monograph, SHDWSOFDUST: A 7 Year Anthology of Analog Photography Work — a title that does the honest thing and tells you exactly what it is: seven years of shooting, collected. A monograph is a different kind of statement than a single show or a magazine feature; it's an argument that the work holds together as a body, not just as individual images, and it usually only gets made once an artist's practice has enough range and consistency to survive being read start to finish.

Three portraits, one deck format

An 85 × 20 cm maple deck is a demanding surface for a portrait — tall, narrow, nothing like the rectangle a photograph is usually printed or framed in. What makes Walrond's work suit it anyway is that his portraits are already built around mood and texture rather than a wide, scene-setting composition; a tight, vertical crop loses less of what the image is actually doing than it would with a photograph that depends on its surroundings.

See the full range, plus the rest of his exhibition and publication history, on the Michael David Walrond collection page.

Related reading

• Working with Artists — how deckarts collaborations work
• Contemporary and pop art
• Materials and quality — how a deck is printed
• Skateboard Wall Art: the complete guide

Biographical details and quotes from each artist's own materials, websites and social accounts. Artwork © Braviera, © Michael David Walrond.