Renato Silva

Renato Silva (Rio de Janeiro, January 28, 1904 - Rio de Janeiro, August 6, 1981) was a Brazilian illustrator and comic book artist.

Career He studied fine arts in the early 1920s, at the same time he started making humorous drawings for several magazines in Rio de Janeiro, such as Vida Doméstica, Vida Nova and A Maçã. In 1930, Silva left humor drawing and began to do literary illustration, collaborating with O Cruzeiro and O Jornal. He then started working as an illustrator in the communication group A Noite. A Garra Cinzenta, a villain without powers but with great knowledge of science, was produced between 1937 and 1939 for the newspaper A Gazeta, totaling 100 pages. The character was also published in Mexico and Belgium, where he received the name "La Griffe Grise", having been published in the weekly Le Moustique from 1944 to 1947.

In 1939, Silva published the book Manual Prático de Desenho ("Practical Drawing Manual" in free translation), the first guide for drawing in Brazil. After that, he started to dedicate himself to art education, developing the how-to draw book series A Arte de Desenhar ("The Art of Drawing" in free translation) with more than one hundred themed editions in the 1940s and 1950s.