BEAUTY: Illustration--Nicolas De Crécy

I just discovered the wonderful French artist, author and illustrator Nicolas De Crécy. He has an absolutely gorgeous style that runs the gamut from quick pen and ink or pencil sketches to full on oil portraits. I love his watercolors of cities like New York, Florence, Lisbon and London. And I really love his anthropomorphic scenes of humans and animals... they are at once silly and alarming. I am always very attracted to human-animal hybrids in art.

De Crécy has written several graphic novels and I am particularly interested in two of them. GLACIAL PERIOD is a book he created in collaboration with the Louvre, about a future civilization discovering the Louvre and its contents buried for thousand of years. These future humans have been cut off from history and wonder about the objects found in the museum. His newest series, SALVATORE 1: TRANSPORTS OF LOVE and SALVATORE 2: AN EVENTFUL CROSSING, about a dog who is a mechanical genius, blends talking animals and humans in a fantasy world.

Below is a sampling of work form his blog "500 Dessins" ("500 Drawings"). There are no discernable titles for these pieces, but I have grouped them into places, and then humans and animals (and human animals). Take a look at the last picture which shows one of De Crécy's sketchbooks with a beautiful in-progress watercolor of the London skyline.


http://500dessins.blogspot.com/