With some delay, I wish you a Merry Christmas 2024 , hoping you had a wonderful time celebrating with your family. This is the perfect occasion to share an article looking back at a few game pages with a Christmas theme . These games were created for Le Journal de Mickey , a famous french magazine published by Disney Magazines (a subsidiary of Unique Heritage Media ). Do you publish illustrated games or want a creative way to present your content? Contact me here , and I’ll bring energy, creativity, and color to your project!

I wish you a very creative and joyful 2025 ! And this is the perfect opportunity to share a timely animation. A few years ago, I collaborated with my friend, author Pierre-Etienne Bertrand , to create a New Year's greeting animation . It was a commission for the website https://www.linternaute.com/ , which at the time offered various digital services, including online greeting cards. I really enjoy animating my drawings, working on the backgrounds, and adding the right music and sounds. I'll have the opportunity to post some examples on this blog later this year, as I've created animations several times throughout my professional journey. If you're looking to showcase a project with a little humorous animation, I can definitely meet your needs. Contact me here, and let's discuss it!

When you're a freelance illustrator , your workload isn't always consistent throughout the year. Sometimes, there are periods where you have fewer contracts, and it's during those times that you should take the opportunity to improve your skills, train, reach out to new clients, or work on more personal projects . With this in mind, I signed up for the website childrensillustrators.com  in September 2024, after reading a few positive—or at least not entirely negative—reviews online. Childrensillustrators.com is a paid platform dedicated to promoting illustrators specializing in children's literature. Founded in 2004, it provides artists with a professional showcase to present their portfolios to an international audience, thus facilitating connections with publishers, authors, and other professionals in the industry. The annual membership fee is $350 , which is a significant cost. The platform is active on social media (Instagram, X, Facebook, etc.), where it regularly shares artists’ works, interviews, and relevant news, promising to enhance illustrators' visibility. In five months, my work has been featured on Children's Illustrators only once . Considering that 360 illustrators are registered on the platform, you shouldn’t expect your work to be highlighted very often. However, I find this rather underwhelming given the subscription cost. To increase visibility, there is a "News" section on your profile, which you can update regularly, much like a blog. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to take advantage of this feature. There are also paid options available: A $50 "boost"  that increases your visibility for 7 days. A $29.99 annual add-on  that allows you to list your published books and gain a little more exposure. It’s worth mentioning that there is no direct interaction between you and the platform. Essentially, you are paying to host a portfolio on a site that claims to have high traffic. The platform does appear to be followed by some illustration agencies, but I’m not sure how useful that is. If you’re looking for an agent, the simplest and free option is to submit your application directly to an agency. As of now, I have not received any professional leads from the platform, and it has brought me very little apart from slightly more visibility in search engine results . Since I launched my own website shortly before joining the platform, good SEO (search engine optimization) is important for me, but it’s certainly not worth $350. For example, one of my illustrations was featured on the platform’s Instagram page, which has 105,000 followers, but it garnered fewer than 150 likes, no comments, no professional leads, and barely any traffic to my website. To put things into perspective, when I launched my website, I spent €150 on a Google ad campaign over a few days. This brought significant traffic to my site and even resulted in a commissioned illustration. I’ll write a follow-up review once my year-long subscription is complete . For now, I am not very impressed with Children's Illustrators. I believe the platform should offer more services and diversify its marketing tools, given the number of illustrators and the high subscription fee. If you still decide to give it a try, make sure to keep your portfolio and news section updated regularly, treating the platform as if it were a second website. Recently, I came across recommendations for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators  (SCBWI). Their membership costs only $80-$100 per year  and offers more valuable services. I will definitely consider trying this option in the future. You can find more details on their website: https://www.scbwi.org/ .

Following the post entitled Cinema Portraits 1 , here are two new vector portraits made on Adobe Illustrator software , on an identical theme. As in the first topic, I explore here a rendering that plays with black and white (no color, no shades of gray). I also try to have fairly simplified portraits, without too many lines . It is the large areas of black that will give substance to the characters. I made these illustrations thinking strongly about the film noir of the 40s and 50s . For a while I read a lot of the writer Raymond Chandler , especially his crime novels featuring the cynical detective Philip Marlowe . And I naturally saw their famous film adaptations (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Farewell My Lovely ...). Are you interested in this graphic style for your projects, or would you like a " cinema " type portrait? Click on this link to contact me .

It's October , the time when pumpkins take over vegetable gardens and markets , becoming the go-to ingredients for fall recipes. Soups, pies, gratins, and other crumbles comfort us as the evenings get cooler! In the same spirit as National Pumpkin Day , celebrated on October 26 in the United States , where Americans highlight the culinary and decorative uses of this vegetable, many French events help brighten up the fall season . This is the perfect opportunity to share with you this visual I created a few years ago for the French festival " Courges et Merveilles ", organized by the Meuse Nature Environnement association, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year The illustration was used to create posters and flyers , with the white part of the drawing serving as a space to include all the event's essential information. I regularly design posters from start to finish , ready for print, to enhance your communication. Alternatively, as in this case, I can provide just a visual for your graphic designer to use in the layout. Wishing you a delightful pumpkin tasting!

This October 2024, a book will be released for which I had the pleasure of illustrating the cover, based on an idea by Pierre-Etienne Bertrand . This original work, written by Luc Mary and published by EDP Sciences , takes the form of an interstellar travel guide , inviting you to explore about thirty incredible, real worlds within our Galaxy . Liquid nitrogen-spewing volcanoes, underground oceans ten times deeper than the Pacific, ammonia icebergs drifting on a sea of liquid methane, towering hurricanes, winds of over 10,000 km/h, molten glass rain—these cosmic curiosities will hold no more secrets for you... Visuals are always crucial when trying to communicate scientific content to the general public . An attractive cover that sparks the imagination is the minimum needed to entice readers to engage with the subject . Ideally, interior illustrations (in addition to classic iconography) can help bring breathing room to a text that may be quite dense. I truly enjoy this kind of project, for which I now have significant experience. Would you like to order this book ? Click this link .

I regularly like to explore new graphic styles,  for fun. And it can also lead to professional opportunities ! Here, I created a few black and white portraits on the theme of cinema , using Illustrator  vector software. Vector allows you to enlarge the image infinitely without any loss of quality, which is great for printing very large posters. Are you interested in this graphic style for your projects, or would you like a “ cinema ” portrait? Click here to contact me .

If you need to create a recurring character or mascot , a good illustrator can meet your expectations: the drawing style , postures and movements , expressions , and even the smallest details will bring to life the hero you’ve imagined in your mind. The difference between the initial sketches and the final result can sometimes be significant! Here, we’ll talk about the creation of Taoki , a little dragon who is the main character in books designed to teach reading in primary schools. This series is published by ISTRA (part of HACHETTE EDUCATION ). Taoki already existed and had been illustrated by another artist, but Hachette asked me to redraw him in my own way, with a brand-new graphic style. As you can see from the first sketches at the beginning of the article, the character appeared dynamic and mischievous , but it wasn’t quite right: he was a little too tall for his age and perhaps not naive enough . The target audience is children who are learning to read. The publisher selected from the additional sketches a smaller and stockier dragon that needed a bit of refinement. At this point, the character is nearly finalized. He now looks like a mischievous "little boy" dragon . His eyes give him a wiser look than before. And here’s the final sketch! This is the Taoki the publisher was expecting, who will become the hero of 15 books ! Find Taoki on HACHETTE EDUCATION ’s website: https://www.enseignants.hachette-education.com/recherche?search_api_views_fulltext=taoki

On September 5th, my comic book " In the Energy Mix"  was released by EDP Sciences , written by Pierre-Etienne Bertrand under our pseudonyms peb & fox . This is a pedagogical and scientific comic book focused on the energy challenges of tomorrow . The topic is explored through the work of nine PhD students from various CEA centers (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives). Peb did an incredible job synthesizing, researching, coordinating, and scripting this work, which I had the pleasure of illustrating. It was totally worth it! Not only is this comic informative, but it's also very funny! You can order it (the book is in french!) on the publisher's website or on Amazon .

My various professional experiences in the world of illustration have led me to explore very different fields . One area I'm particularly interested in is nature . I'm often called upon to draw animals , environments and a range of biodiversity . Here are a few examples of animal drawings I've used for educational projects.