Honduran artist and illustrator Hernan Ramos turned a side project for publishing drawings after work into a full career built on music festival posters, vibrant chaos and a daily ritual of picking up a random book and seeing what it wakes up.
Gago Illustra began as somewhere to put the drawings that had nowhere else to go. Hernan Ramos was working as a graphic designer, making illustrations in his free time and posting them without any particular plan, and then, as he puts it, without realising it, the side project became the main career. That gradual, unforced transformation says something about the work itself: it was always driven by genuine compulsion rather than strategy.
The illustrations Ramos makes are built for festivals and events, large-scale posters designed to communicate that “something big is about to happen,” as he describes it. Clients have included Florida Grove Fest in the USA, Reggaeton Rave in New York, Othe Armance in France, Neon Countdown in Thailand, and most recently a commission for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina. What connects them is a visual energy rooted in layered colour, deliberate chaos and the dense compositional logic of work that rewards close attention.
“I enjoy the chaos that is generated when placing one colour on top of another,” Ramos says. “There’s a moment when the image starts to take on a life of its own, and that’s what I’m chasing every time.”
The personal work shown here draws from the music he listens to daily: records, artists and sounds that feed a practice as rooted in listening as it is in looking. Alongside music, Ramos has found increasing inspiration in physical objects: toys, records, books. The daily routine he has built around this is simple and specific. He picks up a book at random, browses for hours and waits for something, a sketch, a photograph, a line of text, to wake something in him.
“I go through these resources trying to squeeze every drop of inspiration from them,” he says. “Doing it every day is what keeps the work moving.”
That commitment to a daily practice, unprescribed and unrushed, is the engine behind a body of work that has expanded from a personal project into an internationally recognised illustration career without losing the quality of the original impulse. Drawing, as Ramos has always known it, is a creative refuge. The chaos in the finished posters comes from someone who is, in that space, entirely at home.
Hernan Ramos is an artist and illustrator from Honduras with over ten years of experience in advertising as an art director and more than five years as a freelance digital illustrator.
ARTIST LINKS
gagoilustra.com
@gagoilustra
behance.net/gagoilustra
All images created as part of a personal project, drawing inspiration from music. Digital illustration.
