Youth Making a Difference: Alfredo Siqueiros-Gonzalez turns animals of the past into art

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SOUTH BEND — Doodles on pencil and paper were Alfredo Siqueiros-Gonzalez’s first introduction to art.

He described drawing animals in the style of “circle, circle, leg, leg,” as a child while sitting on his mother’s lap.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez has been drawing ever since.

“Always animals,” he said.

As a kid, he became fascinated with prehistoric life — the animals of the past.

“Out of all the animals there are now,” Siqueiros-Gonzalez said, “there’s 500 million years of animals being visible and multicellular to look at.”

Now, 18-year-old Siqueiros-Gonzalez combined his two passions into his first art he's ever sold.

He sold six of his pieces, a collection of prehistoric animals done in vector art, to be featured at South Bend’s new Dinosaur Museum. The museum, on a 90-acre parcel at 7102 Lincoln Way W. at the U.S. 20 bypass, opened July 12 from South Bend Chocolate Co. founder Mark Tarner.

In a deal he called "generous" with the Dinosaur Museum, Siqueiros-Gonzalez said the art now belongs to the museum for the length of time that they use it. If the museum ever decides to move onto other projects, the copyright will return to him, he said.

“We’re developing an area for local artists,” Mark Tarner said. “It’s a way to be more than a museum,” he said, calling it a cultural way to involve the community through art.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez looked around at the museum, weeks before opening day. He loved the use of the deep green, commenting that it was like a forest.

“You’re such a smart kid,” Tarner told him.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez started working with vector art two years ago, during his sophomore year at Adams High School, with Adobe Illustrator in a digital design course through the Career and Technical Education program within Clay High School’s fine arts program. Siqueiros-Gonzalez said the CTE program “massively” improved his art skills and gave him access to the Adobe software. The program will continue at Riley High School for the 2024-25 school year.

For Siqueiros-Gonzalez, vector art is flexible. The shapes he creates can be adjusted to his needs at any time, he said.

“Instead of illustrating with lines,” he said, “you’re illustrating with shapes that are movable the whole time. If you don’t like how something looks after several hours of working on (it), you can just move it around.”

It all started with a class assignment: make an illustration inspired by an artist you like.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez’s first piece, the dimetrodon, was inspired by the work of Mexican artist Valentino Lasso. He tried to replicate Lasso’s style.

“He’s not a traditional famous historic artist,” Siqueiros-Gonzalez said. “His stuff is really cool — a lot of colors, a lot of shapes. It’s very Latino art.”

After the class assignment, Siqueiros-Gonzalez put together a portfolio with six pieces total, wanting to make one animal for each prehistoric time period and make each artwork a different category of animals. His work displayed ranged from a bird to a mammal to a reptile. Though Siqueiros-Gonzalez sold his work to the dinosaur museum, none were dinosaurs.

Behind the inspiration

Each vector art incorporates its own color scheme, planned specifically to complement or contrast the colors within.

● Dimetrodon (early Permian Period): an extinct non-mammalian synapsid. “A proto-mammal,” Siqueiros-Gonzalez called it, evolved from a reptile.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez spent four days creating the dimetrodon, splitting his time between school and art. The synapsid uses tertiary colors–red, yellow and blue–that Siqueiros-Gonzalez said forms a triangle on the color wheel.

In his latter five artworks, Siqueiros-Gonzalez started developing his own style.

● Quetzalcoatlus (late Cretaceous Period): a pterosaur, which is a flying reptile.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez said this “giant giraffe-sized” animal is his favorite based on the sheer magnitude of it. “It can swoop down and grab anything, the size of a dog or sheep, and swallow it whole,” he said.

The quetzalcoatlus art uses opposite colors orange and purple. However, instead of using an exact purple, Siqueiros-Gonzalez incorporated a blue and indigo, he said because they’re almost complimentary, but not exactly.

● Tiktaalik (late Devonian Period): an extinct sarcopterygian fish-like animal. It was believed to be the evolutionary missing link between fish and humans.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez said he didn’t put a big emphasis on meaning through each color, but rather wanted to represent a color scheme. He tried to use sensical colors, he said, making the fish vector incorporate shades of blue. The tiktaalik was inspired by the PBS miniseries “Your Inner Fish,” after a trip to the University of Chicago. Siqueiros-Gonzalez met the paleontologist, Prof. Neil Shubin, who discovered the tiktaalik, and created the artwork after their meeting.

● Platybelodon (Neogene Period): a herbivore elephant-like mammal

Siqueiros-Gonzalez incorporated complementary colors–red and green–into the platybelodon art piece. Red isn’t a color mammals are, but it’s close to orange, which he said is close to the reddest that some elephants do get. By using relevant color schemes, Siqueiros-Gonzalez said this makes the art a lot less abstract. He said he created the platybelodon in a way to give observers an interesting perspective. They look up at an animal rather than looking straight at it.

● Endoceras (Ordovician Period): a squid-like animal that ate plankton while drifting through the water.

Composed of a mix of purples, pinks and reds, the endoceras has an analogous color scheme. He chose to use colors that weren't completely accurate, saying green would be more life-like.

● Arthropleura (Carboniferous Period): the large millipede-like insect was estimated to exceed 8? feet long, which is roughly equivalent to the width of a school bus.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez’s last piece was also his quickest piece. Spending four to six hours on the prehistoric insect, he’s proud of his work, but still wishes he could play with them a bit more.

A future with dinosaurs and art

Now that his art has been purchased, Siqueiros-Gonzalez plans to start a new fresh series. He’ll continue to create animal-inspired art through category-style art, such as showing prehistoric to modern-day elephants.

“I should really get back into texturing,” Siqueiros-Gonzalez said, adding that he also enjoys digital painting. He doesn’t work much with physical art.

Siqueiros-Gonzalez is not pursuing art as a career. Rather he’ll attend Purdue University in the fall of 2024 as a geology major, which will get him one step closer to a career in paleontology.

Though he’s pursuing the study of ancient life, art will not be buried in his past.

“Whether commercially or not, I don’t know,” he said. “I will continue my art. That is a thing that will be with me for the rest of my life.”

Email Tribune staff writer Camille Sarabia at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Vivid colors, bold shapes bring teen's prehistoric-inspired art to life