Born in New York City to parents newly arrived from Puerto Rico I learned to read, write & draw largely thanks to a box comics handed down from older brothers. Starting school I quickly noticed my facility for drawing and took it on as a life long pursuit. Early successes include appearances in the local paper and mural’s in the middle-school cafeteria. Intense vocational training equipped me with foundational technical skills that are still useful despite the invention of auto-kerning. Working my way through collage I studied sequential art and illustration under legendary comic-book artist Carmine Infantino at New York’s School of Visual Arts.
Patrick Lugo CV
My first pro comic pages where published during the 90’s comic boom by independent comics publisher Double-Edge Publishing. I became their Art Director just before leaping at the opportunity to move cross-country to California. There, I was employed as Senior Designer/Art Director for TC Media International; publisher of KUNG FU TAI CHI magazine & KungFuMagazine.com. Within the pages of that magazine I created the long running comic series TIGER’S TALE. Added to taht I was key in developing their web presence and have since worked with hundreds of martial artist and Kung Fu Masters in a variety of artistic capacities.
My previous work includes illustration for Little Monk and the Mantis: A Bug, A Boy, and the Birth of a Kung Fu Legend, published by Tuttle Publishing. It was awarded both the Book of the Year Honor from the Gellett Burgess Center for Children’s Literature as well as the 2012 Preferred Choice Award from Creative Child Magazine. I also had the privilege of personally gifting an Artist’s Edition of this book to the venerable Shi Yongxin (释永信) Abbot of the historic Shaolin Temple Monastery; where the book is set. The original art for this book was featured in the Annual Children’s Book Illustrator Exhibit at the Sun Gallery in Hayward California, where I have been a recuring artist and instructor.
The middle-grade Kindle reader LUCY VELOZ: HIGH-FLYING PRINCESS features full color illustrations and was published by Cosmic Ray Press in 2020. Just last year, I provided cover art and a short comic to the 12″ Double-LP vinyl album / comic anthology fusion project: The Earegoggle Regales, The Eargoggle Reveals by Very Fine Recordings NYC. The short comic story CONTRABAND was published in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology published in 2021 by Ohio State University Press and called “A knockout” by Publisher’s Weekly.
A Tiger’s Tale was crowdfunded in 2022 and reached it’s funding goal overnight, closing at 295% of its original funding goal. On