Filling every page

Nomadic Spanish artist José Naranja has nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, where the former aeronautic engineer posts photos of his richly detailed full-color ink and watercolor sketches.

Sectioned off by rules and curves or rimmed in multi-colored copy that runs up and down the page margins, Naranja's fussy, full-bleed illustrations are of nature, elaborate dreamt-up board game patterns (which have become actual games?!), or photorealistic travel journal-style observational renderings of his immediate surroundings—wherever the very well-travelled artist might be at the time.

Naranja's drawings, once committed to pocket Moleskin notebooks but now entered in his own handmade journals, are often heavily annotated in elegant calligraphic text and punctuated, collage-style, with pasted-in beer bottle labels, stamps, or currency of the world. He's selling edited reproductions of his art in manually bound, 120-page facsimiles he calls "The Orange Manuscript."

See Lines and Colors for more photos and Notebook Stories for a late December 2017 interview with the artist.

All images © José Naranja. Visit his blog, check out his prints, and "The Orange Manuscript."