It started with a black shape, then became a “mud man” (snow man cousin), then a little guy who appears to look like the Little red riding hood, then a wolf. Loved the process.

The last few weeks have been very exciting for my little illustration world. I pushed myself a bit more than usual in order to trigger my main 2010′s resolution: showing off my work further than my bedroom, family & friends.

It has been a great mix of meeting real people (creation-related Meetup; professional illustrator Mr Bingo) and receiving feedback on my illustrations on the French art forum Café Salé (thanks to Antoine for the link :) ). All of this has been very inspiring and helped me to build up confidence in what I do. The critics I received from the Café Salé community have been great to take a proper step back on my work. Here is what I’ve considered for this new illustration:

• be careful with colour choice and saturation
• working on a meaning before the drawing’s done
• pushing myself more than usual to avoid the syndrome of a “polished half-way done illustration”

The second point is still my main worry as I really use to start drawing from scratch (no idea, no brief) and, to be honest, this is what I’ve done for this one but I finally added something meaningful – the lamps – before I finish the drawing. Half a victory then!

Also, it might be cheating but I just spotted that this week Illustration Friday topic – Focused – kind of matches what I’ve ended up with. So I’m also sharing with you IF people ;)

Here’s my Illustration Friday submission of the week (I’ve said that before but I’m going to try to submit every week from… now… hopefully) for: Crunchy!

With 2009 nearly done I illustrated what has been the crunchiest topic of the year: the credit (crunch, yes). I initiated a style a bit more realistic this time and not as colourful as usual with, eventually, something a bit more meaningful.

Here’s a 1am inspiration triggered by Illustration Friday‘s topic of the week: “Entangled” or the art of making things complicated. Sounds like an universal topic to me.

First drawing attempt since I’ve finished my recent illustration course, I’ve started this from last week Illustration Friday theme: poist. But I also decided to follow my instinct and go for something which wouldn’t be under control. So I can’t give more explanation than that and just move on to the next one, hopefully soon!

Here’s my instant interpretation of this week Illustration Friday: Intricate. I tried my new eco-friendly wax pastels from Caran D’Ache for the first time and get impressed by how easy is it to mix colours together and fill up large amount of the spread very quickly.

It Might sounds silly but among my current illustration course, I’m just rediscovering how good it is to draw traditionnaly rather than digitally. The variety of drawing tools, papers, colours is a fantastic sources of inspiration and beat my old pixels friends. Well, I still like digital but I’ve just forget a bit too much about simplicity of paper!

My first thought about the last Illustration Friday topic was that it will be quite inspirational but, finally, I went a bit further in the concept than expected and choose to sketch a guy who, after pretending too much, see his face on a mirror and don’t recognize himself… so he get surprised or even scared.

Well, according to my partner, this is not an obvious illustration for a topic called “pretend” as it should works without any forms of explanations. I kind of agree with that but I’d like to have various point of view on this question: Should an illustration be obvious at the first second you see it, or is it good to have a little reflexion in order to understand it?

As usual (when I run out of time) I sketched using Colors! on my Nintendo DS.

Here’s my feeling about the last Illustration Friday topic: Vacant, or how to get very bored and depressed because of doing nothing or having no interest in anything. It’s not fun but it can happens sometimes. That’s why it’s so important to stay busy and to do stuff!

No Nintendo DS this time. I started with a classic sketch and colorized with Photoshop. Quite basic but I feel pretty comfortable with this process.

The original draft

The face at the original drawing dimensions

I’ve been struggling with this week’s Illustration Friday topic.

Late is an interesting word as it can be interpreted in many different ways but I started going in too many directions and it didn’t help. Finally I decided to illustrate how being late can be good sometimes to make a change with the obvious feeling of late = bad.

I wasn’t sure that the meaning will be obvious with my fishy illustration so I add a tag line even if I’d prefer avoiding that.

Again, I’ve done it on my Nintendo DS using Colors!. The main idea was to sketch it and colorize in Photoshop but I ran out of time (…a bit late?). Here’s the initial sketch: