So, Attica! This project was a big part of my life, actually not only mine, but I'll give my point of view here.

Everything started two years ago, when Fahim, Larson and I were often meeting at Georges Melies school to work on Harold and Matthieu who was working on his Student Film. We had been big fans of artbooks for a long time, and especially the ones from Design Studio Press (scott roberston) like the Skillful Huntsman or Alien Race, books about concept and creative process only. So we asked ourselves "why not taking our art to the next level? Let's make a book too!".

We wanted to make this project a participative thing, where people would come to enjoy their passion for drawing and learn from each other. We created a story, based on Fahim & Larson's works, talked a lot about the how and when. And tried to get confirmation from everyone to come 1 month during the summer, and make some epic pictures based on the story we had. So after several months of preparation, and with our science-fiction story of two sisters and many scary aliens, the production was ready to start, end of July 2010.

I also had a personnal goal in the making of this book. After working as a 3d artist for one year after school, I really wanted to go back to drawing and become a concept artist. So this gave me a really good training, and fortunately I was hired as a concept artist a few months after.

Everything may not have gone the way we were expecting, considering the process itself and the actual presence of everybody involved. But it was our first, mistakes had to be part of it and in the end, we still made it and were very proud of what we had achieved! 

When we finally had all the images and all the texts put together, we had to make the actual book! It took almost one year for us to make this materials come to a final print, through lots of layout stages. Each of us were very busy with our work so it was hard to hold meetings and get it done. But we finally saw the end of this project! And that moment when we could hold our first book in hour hands was awesome, quite a joy and relief. And also a revenge on all our unfinished projects!

Anyway, I hope we'll have the occasion to make another book very soon!
And a big up to eveyone who worked on this! Go check their stuff out!

Fahim   Larson   Matthieu

Julien   Loic   Guilhem   Marine

Here is a selection of my work on Attica :

To anyone who would be interested in the book, I am sorry that we only did enough prints for the ones involved, but you can send me an e-mail to get a free pdf version! (also, texts in the book are in french^^)

(2 studies from reference images and 1 from scratch, CLICK for HD)

Well! I have not been uploading for a little while now. That was because of my travel to Korea, I arrived fine and alive after eleven hours of my first plane flight ever! Anyway, I have made a little photoblog to share my journey with the folks back home, so here it is : Molla album ! I'll upload often as my one year stay goes on. And some more drawings and 3d stuff to come soon. ^^