Following my recent liberation I confirm that I’m stuffed of drawing digitally and I will now only use paper for this purpose (because paper, I love you). However, I deeply enjoyed killing hours of commuting scratching my little screen and transforming a boring routine into an exciting one.

A selection of my Colors’ sketches are now archived where they belong to and following my first recycling I quickly sketched up a new one based on a challenging daily challenge: keeping things going.

Cycles, life cycles, activity cycles, it’s all very circular and this is not the first time I hear myself thinking I want to go back sketching on paper rather than on my old and scratchy Nintendo DS screen. I had enough and, during my last Eurostar trip, I’ve started enjoying my new Moleskine and fine Bic more than I expected.

Again, I love you paper, so much.

One question: What’s going on above our heads?

One answer: This is why we don’t (need to) know.

I’ve been too busy to feed my blog during the past few weeks so, to keep the flow going, here is another free sketch experimentation from the (hot!) London underground. More to come soon!

An illustration based on a friend’s travel experience featuring Manbox.

Sometime, life can be challenging. The trick is to focus on the positive aspect of things. Use an hair-brush.

The idea of mashing up my passions for both Gypsy Jazz and illustration could have been obvious but only popup in my mind a couple of weeks ago. It didn’t take me long to let myself inspired by Mr Django Reinhardt for a sketch I started last Sunday.

I then realised that Le Quecumbar – UK temple of Django’s music – was about to celebrate it’s 7th birthday on Wednesday and this ongoing piece will problably fit very well there. So, for the first time I decided to illustrate for an external purpose. I really love Le Quecumbar since I moved to London three years ago and the idea of adding my two cents to this magic place excited and motivated me as never before. The deadline was a bit tight tight – two days (well… nights) – to finish the drawing and colorize it.

It’s been exhausting but very rewarding and helped me out to evaluate how long I need to do something like this. Moreover Sylvia Rushbrooke – Le Quecumbar owner – and her super friendly staff gave me a very warm feedback on this. Thanks a lot to all of you; not to say that the night and the music (and the wine) was thrilling as usual :).

Following my previous illustration resolutions I’ve been very careful at using a limited desaturated colour palette. In my opinion it helps to highlight the line and fits the vintage theme pretty well.

Following are some of the key steps I followed, from scribbling to framing:

Here is the latest of my commute time compressing sessions.

At the beggining of this project I decided to do a daily shot of my growing mo’ for fun and, as I promised to my colleagues, here it is. I thought it will be fun to watch but it looks a bit creepy at the end (according to my beloved too). Anyway I haven’t take a shot of myself every day during a month for nothing, so I have to publish it!

As strange as it can sounds I actually enjoyed and get used to this unexpected new face item. Since the end of the 70-80s the moustache became terribly cheesy and young people wearing a mo’ became really rare as far as I know. Weirdly I always feel that some people does look like they have a face to have a mo’ (others don’t) and it will be disturbing to see them without it.

All I want to say is that Movember experience change my vision of the moustache and I currently still have it and love it! As she has to deal with it (but she loves it!), Aurore offered me a traditional barber session at Geo F Trumper. It’s been a very relaxing and unique experience and I now have a proper mo’ style (forget about style if you watch the video)!

Depuis que j’ai lancé “Julien’s 2″ j’ai essentiellement alimenté la machine à coup d’illustrations (merci Illustration Friday) et… c’est à peu près tout. Je suis assez fier d’avoir pondu une dizaine de nouveaux dessins en un peu plus d’un mois et, recevoir des feedbacks d’inconnus, m’a fait à la fois bizarre (première fois) et extrêmement plaisir (au point de rester scotché des journées sur mon webmail à l’affut de nouveaux commentaires…).

Je conçois toujours ce blog comme “catégories-free” et le trip illustration, même s’il est toujours d’actualité, m’a permit de démarrer ce projet et de tenir plus de deux semaines sans abandonner. Grande première. Toutefois j’ai bien envie d’élargir les sujets et de ne pas poster seulement quand j’ai fini une nouvelle illustration. C’est un peu la raison pour laquelle je n’ai rien posté depuis un moment: très occupé par des projets personnels et professionnels, une moustache à faire pousser, des anniversaires et un Noël à anticiper, et quelques dessins commencés mais jamais terminés.

Conséquence de cette volonté d’élargissement: Je viens de retirer la page “Portfolio” car, en plus d’être vide et inutile, elle aurait plus sa place si ce site était un site d’illustrateur avec un Portfolio. Ce n’est pour le moment pas le cas et si ça arrive un jour je devrais être le premier au courant!

Voilà tout ça pour dire pas grand chose mais au moins je remet le compteur du dernier post sur mon blog à zéro et sa suffit à me soulager. Au moins pour les fêtes!

…quelques illustrations et une moustache-story devraient débarquer bientot, normalement!