They allow me to document the whole process and that gives me ideas. My work on The Blue Dragon pushed me to approach projects in this manner and develop this method. For that project, I had to draw modern China really well. But I didn’t know anything about China and I’d never been there. So I spent a lot of time researching everything down to the last detail. I really appreciated that part of the workload and nowadays, I use this method for all of my projects.

You mentioned fashion magazines. How have they come in handy?

Photographers and illustrators that have worked for magazines like Vogue, for example Horst, David Bailey and René Gruau, inspire me. Their job is to give a personality to clothing and the attitude they portray in their work speaks to me.

Some of my recent illustrations use their approach, like my series on Horai, which is my take on the four seasons, or Aneris, which is inspired by mythology. With these drawings, I was able to experiment with something different that I really enjoy: creating a stylish and mysterious illustration inspired by myths and archetypes.

For me, it’s a foray into expressionism. And much like the work of certain fashion designers and photographers that I like, such as Irving Penn, Helmut Newton or Alexander McQueen, these illustrations are much darker and yet classy at the same time, which speaks to me a lot. They’re bold, defined, cold and revolve around the character’s inner strength.

Speaking of archetypes, I’ve recently started researching the commedia dell’arte and its characters, Scaramouche, Pierrot and the others, and I find it really interesting! I like how the story unfolds and how it’s transformed over time between appearing in theatre and at the movies. I love using stories like these as inspiration for subtext in my drawings, without making it obvious. For me, adding details like that contribute to the illustration in a larger sense and are never insignificant.

You’ve mentioned names of photographers and talked about music, movies and fashion… but we haven’t talked about the illustrators that inspire you. Who are they?

These days, I am really into painting and there’s one painter in particular I really like: Caspar David Friedrich. His name was often mentioned to me in relation to one of my illustrations - Rooftop Inspiration - but I’ve only recently discovered him.

After hearing his name so often, I finally decided to look him up and immediately saw the similarities between my illustration and one of his works - Wanderer Above the Sea Fog. I bought a book of his paintings and it spoke to me a lot. The composition in his work is similar to mine and so are his themes. Perhaps we’re from different eras but have the same fetishes.

I don’t have any formal art or art history training, so it’s really through research that I’ve come to discover so many great artists. As I’ve become more interested in art history, I’ve started to get the feeling that there’s a certain coherence to what I’m doing. That’s allowed me to look back and reflect on how I go about creating my art.

Other than that, there are several illustrators that inspire me : Norman Rockwell, Bernie Fuchs, Edward Hopper, Moebius, Bilal, Ottomo, Fred (Philémon), Hugo Pratt, Jamie Hewlett… there are so many good artists!

We touched on archetypes earlier. Are there eras and/or characters that often come up in your work?

Yes, well they’re often pensive observers or travellers. In Rooftop, the character is standing on a snowy rooftop in New York, surrounded by the city’s buildings. In Beyond the Boundaries, a woman is standing in the desert and looking towards the horizon, as if she’s getting ready to face a storm or about to reach a point of no return. There are a lot of these kinds of characters in my illustrations for The Blue Dragon, especially in the transition scenes that aren’t in the original play. I added them to the graphic novel to give depth to the characters outside dialogue scenes.

These pauses isolate them and bring some down time which adds dramatic tension to the story.

You’ve probably been asked this before: do you think you’ll do comics again someday?

What I don’t like about comics is how long they take to draw up once the researching, scriptwriting and storyboarding is done. In fact, I feel like I have to play the role of some sort of scribe. Maybe I am not patient enough, maybe I rather give myself the liberty to move on from one style to the next. Right now, what I prefer doing is to draw series of images that tell the fundamental part of a story while leaving the rest to people’s imaginations.

The Blue Dragon represented 200 pages of drawings. I saw what it takes to do that kind of work and I don’t think I have the right temperament to do that my whole life. Drawing takes patience and concentration and I am not great at either of those things, hahaha! But you know, never say never!