For as long as I can remember, I've been telling stories.
Sometimes they began with a drawing. Sometimes with a place that wouldn't leave my imagination. Occasionally it was simply a feeling I couldn't quite put into words. Whatever the starting point, the story always came first.
Over the years those stories found different forms. Some became illustrated books. Others became graphic novels. A few remained as paintings or sketchbooks filled with ideas. More recently, they've begun to move through animation.
For a long time I thought these were separate pursuits.
Looking back, I realise they were all part of the same practice.
I've never been interested in mastering a single medium. I've always been interested in following a story wherever it wanted to go.
Some stories feel at home on the page. Others unfold through sequential art. Occasionally a painting reveals something that words never could, or a subtle piece of animation—a drifting shadow, moving dust, the turn of a head—brings a world to life in a completely different way.
The medium isn't the starting point.
The story is.
That's why I've begun thinking about my work as Ciro Correia Studio.
Not as a company or a label, but as a small independent story studio. A place where original worlds are given the time to grow, and where each story is free to become whatever it needs to be—whether that's a novel, a comic, an illustration, a painting or a piece of animation.
I love drawing and painting. They remain at the heart of everything I make. Every world begins there, with pencil marks, brushstrokes and pages filled with sketches. But I've also always been fascinated by animation. There's something quietly magical about seeing a still image breathe. It doesn't have to shout. Sometimes the smallest movement is enough to make a world feel alive.
That's the direction this studio is growing towards.
Not by leaving books behind, but by allowing stories to exist across different forms, each revealing another corner of the same world.
This journal marks the beginning of that next chapter.
It will become a place to share the work behind the work: sketches, paintings, archive entries, fragments, motion studies, ideas still taking shape and, occasionally, the thoughts behind them.
If you've found your way here, welcome.
I hope you enjoy exploring these worlds as much as I've enjoyed creating them.
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