Ciruelo Cabral was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on July 20, 1963. His formal art training was limited to a few courses in drawing and advertising design, after which, at the age of 18, he immediately found work in an ad agency as an illustrator. At 21 he became a freelance illustrator and started a career as a fantasy artist.
In 1987 Ciruelo traveled to Europe and settled in Sitges, Barcelona, Spain. He then embarked on a search for publishers for his "worlds of fantasy", eventually finding them in Spain, England, the United States and Germany, and through this means has reached a broad audience. Ciruelo continues to work for U.S. publishers, among them Bantam for whom he did book covers for the trilogy written by George Lucas, "Chronicles of the Shadow War".
He also has created a number of rock album covers, Steve Vai's The 7th Song and The Elusive Light and Sound being two of them. Other clients include Wizards of the Coast (Magic: The Gathering), TSR, Berkley, Tor, Warner, Ballantine, Heavy Metal magazine, Playboy magazine, etc. He worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky on a comic story published in France in 2006.
In 1990 Ciruelo devoted eight months to designing and illustrating The Book of the Dragon to be published by the Spanish publisher Timun Mas, the work proved an enormous undertaking for Ciruelo, who had interrupted his daily routine to take on a project that was destined to profit him only in the long term. Foreign rights to The Book of the Dragon were sold to Paper Tiger, London, in 1992, who had also published his first artbook: Ciruelo, in 1990.
From 1997 to 2008, the artist has published several books of his work: Luz, the Art of Ciruelo (1997), Magia, the Ciruelo Sketchbook (2000), Cuaderno de Viajes de Ciruelo Notebooks (2006) and Fairies and Dragons: Art is Magic (2008).
Ciruelo Cabral lives with his wife Daniela and their kids, Angelo and Lys in Sitges, a quaint and magical town near Barcelona, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
