Being at the same time a excellent film-maker, a reference in intellectual humour and the best clarinettist of his generation, Mr. Allen came up with the briliant idea of exorcizing his anguish and anxiety by turning them into comedies, this being much more profit-making than going to a therapist. His best movies work according to a very subtle mix : a neurotic and not very good-looking hero meets the love of his life with a fresh girl who must be at least 30 years under him.

The point in caricature is recognizing famous faces, so don't worry, I won't only caricature historical figures, but also contemporary celebrities.

Today, an organic product issued from the film industry, a little french actress becoming more and more well-known. Audrey Tatou has not suffered a lot under my pen ( I could resolve myself to make this pretty face look ugly ). The spoon is obviously a reference of the character of Amélie that revealed her to the cinema ( ya, she's not only a descendant of Jesus or a fashion designer who has given her name for a perfume ).

If you want to know what I personally think of the movie Amelie, as a French, I would say that it's a very enjoying and poetic entertainment, and I would really love to be in the fictionous country she seems to live in...

This little fellow comes from a series of drawings I started on the original blog, and I'm still continuing it. Unfortunately, I don't think you will see a lot of them since most of his aphorisms involve french puns (  they are often the only point of the drawing ). I will every now and then translate one or two of his appearances when there is no play on words.

He was created as a spoof of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic of litterature, " Le Petit Prince " ( " The Little Prince" ), a children story about a little boy living on a ridiculously tiny asteroid and having naive remarks on life.

My version is dark haired and named " Le Petit Pince-Sans-Rire ", which is yet another pun of word in french. "Pince" sounds similar to "Prince", and a "pince-sans-rire" is how we call somebody with a cynical and dry wit.

I know, it's never funny when you explain a joke...

Cleopatra VII ( -69 / - 30 BC ) : 

Most certainly the only Pharaoh of Egypt who would not allow depictions of herself from side view. She was famous during Antiquity for her bewitching beauty, but it's true that her nasal appendix was worth appearing in her mensurations.

Heiress to the throne, Cleopatra would be very soon at odds with her brother Ptolemy XIII , even more when they married each other. The young woman would do anything

( and anybody ) to govern Egypt alone.

It started with the arrival of Julius Caesar, during his cruise on the Nile. Using her charms, Cleopatra gained his heart rapidly. Their relationship ended when he decided to go back to Rome, fearing to be 'assassinated'. But at the time, Caesar was thinking of his wife when he said that...

The tragic death of Ptolemy XIII, involving a passing crocodile, meant Cleopatra was henceforth Queen of Egypt. She moved on to a steamy liaison with Marc Antony, which enabled her to annex Syria, the south of Minor Asia and Cyprus to the Egyptian Kingdom, but also not to stay alone on saturday evenings.

Then things went bad when opponents to Marc Antony led by Octavian entered the city. Facing no alternative, she and her lover resorted to suicide. Cleopatra, for the dramatic effect, chose to kill herself with the bite of a snake on her breast. Some of the filthiest creatures on earth can turn out to be very lucky. 

Mankind's fascination for this historical figure seems to have survived centuries, in spite of the fact that Cleopatra was never mummified. Well, anyway, her facial particularity would have made impossible the shutting of her sarcophagus... 

Lucrezia is part of my various range of characters. She's a goth...but being of North African origin, she's not very as pale as she would like to be.

She's one of my first serious attempts of coloring by computer, a technic I surely do not master for the moment. I admit that the second version ruined the first one, but with training I might come one day with something decent...

Some sketches...

Abraham Lincoln ( 1809-1865 ) :

Sixteenth President of the ( more of less ) United States and the first to possess a wart near his nostril. In the perspective of gathering more voices for his next campaign, he abolished slavery in 1865, thus making Afro-Americans to join the so far very selective club of Human Rights. His mandate was a bit disturbed by the American Civil War, which opposed the Union Troops in their flamboyant navy blue uniform thanks to the Fairy Washing Powder, and the Confederate Army, whose light grey never faded with the triple action of the new Omo.

Irony can be a bitch, since the War will end only four days before he would be murdered by a fire shot while he was at the theater. There is no moral in this story, but it gives you a good excuse for not going with your wife to attend this boring play she planned to see with you next sunday. You never know.

MY FRIEND : So, I picture it as a crossbreeding between a penguin and an ostrich, I don't know how you could do that, but it should look like a mix of both. This bird is supposed to live in an austral country. Looks very stupid. And I would call it a " burdot ". Do you think you could draw that for me ?

ME : Just asking, but are you aware that it's in my exam period ?

- This was extracted from a conversation I had last june with one of my comrades. Still I found time to scribble this imaginary animal between my revisions. By the way, " Burdot " doesn't mean anything in french. When I asked my friend the reason of this name, it turned out that it was the family name of one of his acquaintances, whom he didn't like at all...

The second playbill for the theater compagny in Lyon, which has been, from what I have heard, printed in like 200 issues and displayed a bit everywhere in the city.

There is a former version of this drawing which showed the actresses as they appeared to me on their photos ( they are in their twenties ), but the company specifically asked me to age them, because the characters they played were supposed to be very old, so make-up would be heavily used in the end. I therefore apologize for the two young ladies who have been applied Yoda's skin cream for this purpose...

She's supposed to represent the incarnation of ideal beauty, the climax of feminity and the depiction of inaccessible love.

"Supposed".

According to my own scale, it may be the best illustration of non-realistic female representation my metacarpuses could produce. It doesn't mean I can't do better than that. But once I finished drawing this brunette, I wouldn't change anything. It's nearly my vision of the perfect girl. Still, I prefer those in the real world, if only for their tri-dimensional side...