Margaux Motin's French Touch

So yesterday I bought peachy French illustrator and comic strip author Margaux Motin's latest book to bring a little colour and whimsy into the day.

She is a wonderful commercial illustrator who works mostly for women's magazines and chick lit., but who also keeps a humorous (and, in France, very popular) cartoon blog in which she riffs on her everyday life in a lighthearted way.

This is the blog:

http://margauxmotin.typepad.fr/

The three books she has published so far are basically just adaptations of her blog entries, where she presents her hectic life as an over-worked thirty-something urban professional, pop culture fiend and fashion victim — who needs to take care of a lively kid daughter, as well as the the ups and downs of a contemporary love life.

What really struck me, when I first saw her stuff, was how great she was a capturing physical attitudes, body language and facial expressions. Her drawings stylise her very subtle observations of herself and the people around her and tweak them with the slightest caricatural or cartoonish push so that they really "project", as a good actor would.

The spare, bright graphic style, with its elegant lines and the strategic use of flat colours (as well as the odd pattern or imbedded photograph) is also very appealing. She expertly leads the viewer's eye through the drawings while enhancing the impact of her little narratives by punctuating them with these delightful bursts of pure colour: vivid, motley, cheery, but also quite organised graphically in their fluctuating proportion and contrast with the black and white line art. I'm reminded a bit of Bill Watterson's winsome Calvin & Hobbes cartoons — not so much in any specific element but in the overall impression of energy, dynamism and stylish visual balance.

Big up Margaux!