Little Khabraal, Ponta de Pedras, Brazil, circa 1994
I was born into a family that owned a print shop in a small town in the northeast of Brazil. Some of my earliest memories are of being around the physical production of images and words. Paper was everywhere. Machines turned designs into objects. Things were cut, printed, assembled, and reproduced. I didn’t think of any of this as particularly interesting at the time. It was just where my family conducted business.
Pergráfica Campus in Salgueiro, Brazil
The town itself was small and extremely hot. In that part of Brazil, we sometimes joke that there’s a sun for each person. It was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody, which would become relevant a few years later when, for reasons I still find slightly ridiculous, I became a local radio personality before I was old enough to drive.
Downtown Salgueiro, Pernambuco, Brazil
But first came the computer. In 1996, I got my first computer. It had previously belonged to the print shop, and it came with a copy of CorelDRAW. I didn’t speak English, and this was long before software was particularly interested in being intuitive. Somehow, none of that stopped CorelDRAW from becoming my favorite thing on the computer. I just figured it out.
CorelDRAW 6, 1995 Edition
By the time I was eleven, I was making my first designs. One of them was an invitation for my little brother’s birthday party, which was being held at a kids’ matinee at a dance club. Was the design terrible? Yes. Do I remember it fondly? Also yes. A few years later, Photoshop entered my life. My family’s business had access to design software, which meant I had access to design software, and I became obsessed with it. For some reason, one of my earliest fascinations was changing people’s eye colors in photographs. I have no meaningful artistic explanation for this. I was a kid with Photoshop. Kids do stupid things. But I kept using the software. In fact, I never really stopped to this day.
Around the same time, I accidentally wandered into an entirely different medium. I was extremely extroverted at school. Apparently I used up my lifetime allocation of extroversion early, because there isn’t much of it left today. Back then, though, if there was a microphone somewhere, odds are I was holding it. One day, a radio personality came to my school for an event. Naturally, I ended up on the mic. Afterward, he pulled me aside and told me that the station was developing a Saturday radio program hosted by two kids, a boy and a girl. He asked if I wanted to be the boy. I had no idea the school event had essentially been an audition.
A week later, my dad was standing in front of a judge getting permission for his thirteen-year-old son to have a job. Wild stuff in retrospect. And that was how, at thirteen, I became a radio host. My friend Olivia and I hosted the show together for four hours every Saturday afternoon on a community radio station. In a small city, that meant people knew us. More specifically, they knew our voices.
Khabraal (Pedro) Radio Portrait, circa 2003
The station also organized a monthly series of public concerts called Show dos Bairros, or Neighborhood Shows. Every month, a stage would go up in a different part of town, and Olivia and I would appear at all of them. They were some of the most fun I had growing up. The biggest drew around 8,000 people in a city of roughly 50,000. At fifteen, I moved away, and that was the end of my extremely brief broadcasting empire.
But radio wasn't all of it. School gave me another place to feed my design curiosity. My favorite place to spend breaks wasn’t the courtyard or wherever normal children were supposed to go. It was the mimeografia, the room where the school’s graphic materials were designed and produced. I was fascinated by what they did and spent countless breaks there asking questions and watching them work. The designers were incredibly patient with me and, for the most part, always welcomed me in. The only time I wasn’t allowed inside was when they were preparing tests, for fairly obvious reasons.
I didn’t know it at the time, but they were probably my first design teachers. I didn’t even know what graphic design was, to be honest, I didn't even know the word 'design', much less that I would eventually cross continents to go to design school. I just knew there was a room at school where people made things, and I wanted to know how all of it worked.
Design school colleagues, 2010
I finished high school and eventually moved to Canada to learn English. I stayed and enrolled in design school in Vancouver. I chose design largely because of Photoshop. I thought I knew what design was. I absolutely did not. Design school completely changed how I saw the world. Photoshop was a tool. Design was an entire way of thinking. Suddenly I was learning about typography, composition, hierarchy, systems, communication, form, and all the decisions behind things I had previously understood mostly by instinct.
Pedro performing tech work, 2024
After graduating, I moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles and got my first design job at a branding agency. I stayed there until I was 26, then moved into tech and became a product designer. For years, design was my career, but making things by hand was increasingly becoming the part I cared about most.
Manual print + scan graphic work
I had been experimenting with manual design for years because it simply felt different from making something entirely inside software. Digital tools gave me enormous control, but physical materials introduced resistance. Paper behaves a certain way. Paint behaves a certain way. A cut edge is either where you intended it to be or it isn’t. There is no Command-Z. And after spending enough years in product design, I needed that.
Product design can consume your creative energy if you aren’t careful. Much of the work is technical. You solve systems problems, negotiate constraints, sit through meetings, document decisions, revise flows, and make endless small compromises. There can certainly be creativity in it, but it isn’t necessarily the kind of creativity that made me want to become a designer in the first place. So I started protecting some of that energy for myself.
Graphic design work based on manual components
I made things for friends. I designed materials for parties happening around Los Angeles. I made custom graphic T-shirts for myself and a small group of friends under a fake clothing label we called Rules Clothing Co. There was no store. There were no customers. You couldn’t buy it anywhere. It simply did not exist outside of us. In retrospect, I think that mattered. On the surface, it might be seen as a clique thing, an attempt to create exclusivity. But that was not the reason, I was making things without having to satisfy a client, a product requirement, a stakeholder, a conversion metric, or even a market. I could make something because I wanted it to exist.
Rules Clothing Co. Design Sheet Sample, 2021
Eventually, those experiments moved further away from graphic design and closer to physical artwork. Portraits became the subject I kept returning to. I became interested in what could happen when the precision I had learned through design collided with processes I couldn’t completely control. That tension eventually became the foundation of my work.
Khabraal prepping and painting a studio proof of 'Aziza', 2026
When I was laid off from my last job in tech, I had a decision to make. I could find another product design job and continue doing what I already knew how to do, or I could take seriously the thing I had been developing alongside my career for years. I chose the second option. Becoming a full-time artist wasn’t really a sudden reinvention. It was more like finally giving my full attention to something that had been developing in the background for most of my life.
Khabraal poses with 'John', 2026
I began turning the techniques I had developed as a hobbyist into a professional painting practice. I kept the precision and planning that came naturally after years as a designer, but paired them with materials that could misbehave. My current work is built through layers of acrylic paint on paper using a stencil-based masking process. Before I begin painting, I break the image apart and create a sequence of masks. The structure is carefully planned, but the painting itself develops through transparent layers of color.
The strange part is that for much of the process, I can’t fully see the portrait I’m making. Areas disappear beneath masks. Paint accumulates. Colors interact. Edges soften. Small accidents happen. I have to make decisions without seeing the complete image, and only near the end, as the masks are removed, does the portrait reveal itself. For someone who spent years designing interfaces where every pixel could be moved, measured, duplicated, and undone, I find that lack of control incredibly appealing.
Painting progression where there's near zero visibility until mask removal
And yet the work is still unmistakably connected to design. I think about negative space. I think about hierarchy. I think about what information can be removed before an image stops communicating. I think about where the eye goes first and what it needs in order to recognize a face. I reduce, simplify, obscure, and rebuild. The tools changed. A cursor became paper, paint, masks, blades, sponges and brushes. But a lot of the thinking stayed.
Photo of 'Cynthia' right after completion.
Even the physical process feels connected to where I started. I grew up watching images move from a computer into the physical world through ink, paper, machines, cutting, and assembly. Decades later, I spend my days moving images through a surprisingly similar boundary. Something begins digitally, gets separated and translated, and eventually becomes an object made from paper and pigment. I didn’t plan that connection.
For most of my life, I didn’t even think of myself as someone who would become an artist. I was the kid playing with CorelDRAW. Then I was the kid on the radio. Then the design student. Then the graphic designer. Then the product designer who made strange shirts for his friends because his day job wasn’t scratching the right part of his brain. Looking backward, though, the transitions don’t feel as disconnected as they did while I was living them.
I’ve always been making things. The software changed, the jobs changed, the countries changed, the audiences changed, and eventually even the medium changed. But somewhere between the print shop I grew up in and the studio I work in today, I realized I had spent most of my life circling the same idea: taking something that exists in my head and figuring out how to make it exist in the world.
Becoming an artist was just the point when I finally decided to make that the work itself.