Untitled (2020) by Alé Mercado (Gawain leaves Camelot). Images shared courtesy of the artist.

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Alé Mercado (1971-present) is a self-taught illustrator and author born in Granada, Spain, based in rural Ireland, where he has worked as a full-time illustrator since 2003. Over the course of his career he has developed a visual language that draws equally on traditional relief printing and digital technique—a method he describes, adapting a term coined by illustrator Zina Saunders, as 'Digicut': a digital woodcut practice in which the discipline and graphic economy of relief print informs and structures the digital image, to the point where the two processes have become, in his own words, 'almost interchangeable' (Mercado, n.d.). This rooting of digital work in the logic of the physical matrix—in which every mark is purposeful and every element of an image serves the brief—gives his work a distinctive quality of considered visual weight. Mercado is a member of Illustrators Ireland, the Association of Illustrators, and the Society of Authors. His work has been shortlisted for the World Illustration Awards (2020) and the Communication Arts Illustration Competition (2020), received an Honorable Mention at the 3x3 Professional Illustration Show (2019), and received a Highly Commended distinction at the World Illustration Awards (2023, Professional Publishing category).

 

Mercado's engagement with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight began as a personal project in early 2020. In his own account of the work: 'At the beginning of 2020, I started daydreaming about what my ideal job would be. One of the first things that came to mind was the medieval poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I absolutely love it, particularly the versions of J.R.R. Tolkien and the one of Simon Armitage. In my head, I started imagining what it would look like with my illustrations. But I didn't just leave it at a wish. I really wanted to work those images' (Mercado, 2021). The resulting series—developed through extensive preparatory drawing in sketchbooks and on iPad before being resolved in graphite, acrylics and digital media—represents a sustained and serious engagement with the poem's visual possibilities. The images are characterised by compressed, forceful compositions, a graphic starkness that owes something to both woodcut tradition and to the conventions of cinematic framing, and a tonal drama that sits naturally alongside the poem's more unsettling registers. The figures of Gawain and the Green Knight are rendered with a physical credibility and psychological directness notably different from the tendency toward romance-derived decorativeness in much earlier illustration of the poem.

 

That personal project has since expanded considerably. Mercado is currently developing a 150-page graphic novel adaptation of the poem for the French market, anticipated in the first quarter of 2027. In correspondence with the author of this research hub he describes a deepening engagement with the scholarly and translational history of the poem: 'I have been using the versions of Tolkien, the one from Francisco Torres Oliver (in Spanish) and, mostly, the Marie Borroff one. Also, the Neil Philip Tale of Sir Gawain (with illustrations of Charles Keeping, one of my heroes)' (Mercado, in correspondence with Eden, 2024). The forthcoming graphic novel is therefore not simply an illustrative project but an act of translation and adaptation in its own right, adding to the long intertextual life of the poem and extending its reach into the French-language graphic novel market.

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References 

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Mercado, A. (n.d.) About. [online] Available at: http://straylines.org/ale/ [Accessed 3 March 2026].

 

Mercado, A. (2021) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. [online] Available at: https://www.alemercado.com/work/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight [Accessed 3 March 2026].

 

Mercado, A. (2024) Personal correspondence with Michael Eden, [date].

 

Philip, N. (1987) The Tale of Sir Gawain. Ill. Charles Keeping. London, Lutterworth Press.

 

Tolkien, J.R.R. (trans.) (1975) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. London, Allen and Unwin.

 

Torres Oliver, F. (trans.) (2001) Sir Gawain y el Caballero Verde. Madrid, Alianza Editorial.
 

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