Four decades ago, my father walked into a gallery in downtown Mexico City to see an exhibition by Mexican painter Tomás Parra. He would meet his future wife (and my mother), while purchasing one of the painter's drawings.

When I turned 17, I was lucky enough to be accepted as the very same painter's apprentice, and for the next four years I would assiduously attend his workshop on a daily basis. I would spend the mornings in his studio, and I would go back to my home to keep on working through the evening. As it hung on my bedroom wall, the drawing, which should at the very least be credited with a supporting role in bringing me to life, would become the focus of most my efforts. I've lost track of time regarding how often I stared up from my drawing table to look at it, with a mixture of dread, envy and admiration.

I've pilfered, pillaged and plagiarized its themes, textures and characters more times than I care to remember and, needless to say, it remains my favorite drawing in the world.

This is the latest attempt.

Portraits of people important to me, created using pencils, sanguines, gouaches and cigarette ashes.

Some page scans from a sketchbook I carried around with me during the summer of 2011.

In October 2005 a good friend of mine took me on a trip to a ghost town in the Mexican Bajio called Mineral de Pozos. We went to take some pictures and found a dry riverbed. I'd taken the precaution of bringing with me some brushes and a lot of red pigment. When I sprinkled the pigment on a puddle, the minerals in the water reacted to the pigment and bubbled up in the most beautiful red and gold patterns. We must have taken about five hundred snapshots in the river that day. Later on I reworked some of them in Photoshop, mixing them with some brushwork done with black india ink and gouaches. These are the results.

Single illustration created using several pencil drawings digitaly composited into a unified image. It was a fun way to try out different possible composition arrangements that I keep meaning to try out again but haven't yet repeated.