José Naranja is filling every page

November 30, 2018—Nomadic Spanish artist José Naranja has amassed tons of followers on Instagram, where the former aeronautical engineer posts photos of the richly detailed full-color ink and watercolor sketches he creates in his journals.

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 jet-setting artist might be at the time.

Naranja's drawings, which were once relegated to pocket Moleskine notebooks but are 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.

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