Guillaume Singelin

ART . January 31st, 2013

Interview with Guillaume Singelin – french illustrator / graphic designer. Born in 1987 in Rennes, he’s also now comic books author and co-founder of “Editions Copains” with Ugo Gattoni.

__________________

Who were your favorite authors when you were a child?

It’s hard to say, though I grew up with Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comics (Don rosa). Also, authors like Otomo and Toryama really impressed me.

Can you tell us more about your comic artist career ? Your beginnings as an author, creating “The Grocery”, etc.

I didn’t seriously think about doing comic books as a career, however during my studies Antoine Ozanam (comic book script writer) contacted me through Tentacle Eye (Antoine Carion). He offered me to work on the project King David (casterman) and I instantly accepted. It was easy enough and fast, I will never be able to thank them enough for starting me off that way.

I’ve also been lucky for The Grocery project (Ankama). I was working in house at the time (on preproduction for a feature film) and I built up The Grocery project with Aurelien Ducoudray. I could show directly to Run the progress (head of 619 comics collection).
As far as The Grocery’s creative side is concerned, it comes from my interest in working with cartoon-ish characters (at the time i got fed up with the semi realistic drawing style) and how much I appreciate the TV series “The Wire”. Aurelien stumbled upon my development pictures on my blog. He’s a big fan of The Wire as well, so he came up with a story and offered me to work with his script. As we’re on the same waelength, it works out very well.

What do you like drawing most?

Telling stories through bits of characters life.

Two years ago, you created “Editions Copains” with Ugo Gattoni. Where does the idea of this project come from ?

We attended the same school, Ugo and I. At the time we completed our schooling, neither of us wanted to work in a studio/company. We gave ourselves a one year time to have fun, experiment and came up with a name our works could fall under.

Can you explain us what is Editions Copains and your role in this agency ?

Agency is a big word, it was more of a name that could bring our works and creative worlds together. The idea was to print out Tees, books, etc.. using the graphic materials. We didn’t actually have a role, we were two and did everything ourselves.

For me, the greatest and most impressive project from “Editions Copains” is the 10 meters long rotring drawing, used then for an interactive website called “Ultra Copains“, where everyone can share, tag and communicate on this huge drawing.
How long did this project take ? Have you done it with Ugo only ?

The project took something like 6 months (working from 3 to 4 days a week).
We took care of the whole graphic/illustrated part. Then, as far as the website goes, coding was done by Nicolas Rouyer and Karim Lozes, who definitely helped us out.

Do you have any stories to tell about this adventure ?

In a 6 moths time, things happen. For instance, a lot of the situations and stories you can spot in the drawing come from our personal life experience.
We worked the whole week, went out on the week ends. On Monday we’d do a recap, and tried to fit in the most stories in the drawing.
We also had a cold sweat. We wanted to showcase the drawing, so we brought it to a gallery. We unwrapped the drawing and realized the composition wasn’t perfect, and tons of things were missing. In the place we’d been working in, it was very hard to get a global vision (even if we’d have a working table of 2meters).

It seems the website caries a lot of interaction, is it a success for you ?

Yes, definitely. We wanted people to have fun looking at it, but also interacting with it. This was made possible thanks to Nicolas and Karim, it was a big bonus for the project. Now the drawing really seems to come alive with the viewers inputs.