Hello to all the members of this amazing Forum, you are making the balloon art spread and grow all over the globe, thanks for the effort and dedication to this balloon world,
it's a world that I totally adore!!!
I really like the title of this section the "star" interview and the thing I like the most from the name is the " " because from my heart I don't feel like a star, I am just a human being with a passion, with a passion and lots of free time to dedicate to what I love and respect: Balloons and the audience, so once that is clear, let's start answering...
---------1, What road led you into balloon modelling?
I live in Altea, a small village (20,000 people now, but 30 years ago when I was 6 it was even smaller) so I didn't see any balloon twister in my childhood, but I had the amazing influence from the amazing Magician Juan Tamariz who had a show on TV and that show was the most amazing thing for me, I started doing some magic with a magic box for kids that I got for Christmas, I only used the book to do all I could without using the included props because all the props looked too tricky, so in my opinion will never illusionate my audience... (don mistake the difference between fooling and illusionating the audience, they are similar but not the same...) this love for magic was forgotten for a while but every now and then I could use what I learned from the book to make people happy.
After some years when I became 18 (1994) I bought a second-hand magic book called "The Best Card Magic in the World" a big lie, but it helped to start so I started to learn card magic, then close up, street magic... A year later I became the president of the magic club of Alicante (50km from Altea) and to be honest I had to study a lot to get to the level a president must have and then to keep the level high. Being the representative of the club, I travelled around Spain from magic meeting to magic festival and at one of them (Almussafes, Valencia 1995) I learned from a magician to twist a dog and a 4 loop petal flower, I remember even today the street where he showed me while we waited for a magician friend to come down from the hotel room, for me to be able to create such a beautiful thing out of a balloon was really really nice, since then I always tried to learn some figures and to make them to entertain people, I was more focused on the illusion and the magic but somehow I collected new ideas and figures from everywhere I could, in those days the knowledge was much more difficult to get than today, so I really took all the flavour to each new design that passed my hands making as much variations as I could... but until my first time in Euro-Jam 2006 I didn't really start creating, before then I just played with 260, I didn't even know that 160 and 350 existed so all my balloons for more than 10 years were copied from other people (or like I read these days in the Internet "inspired" which means same colour and proportions and techniques...) it was my first time at Euro-Jam that made me become a passionate balloon twister, that first year I saw truly amazing artists teaching, I still remember the amazing knowledge I got from the workshops of: Alberto Falcone, Luc Bertrand, Colin Myles, Sabina Kellner, Dennis and Guido, Niko Fric... just too much info and passion for a whole year practising and waiting for the next year of Euro-Jam. One year later I went to the Euro-Jam and to the Millennium Jam and from there on I am a declared balloon lover.
