WHEN I received a Meilleurs Voeux 2008 card from a friend in Paris it featured a colourful illustration of a Parisian shopping arcade.
People were bumping into each other, with bags packed full of goodies, whilst snowflakes drifted in the night sky and in the corner I could have sworn I saw Nicolas Sarkozy.
The artist behind the illustration is Joanna Walsh, whose website Badaude features both the New Year picture, and many of her distinctive views of Parisian life.
Here Joanna talks about what draws her to the French capital and how it all started.
I just got very interested in France, I am not sure why, I suppose I am still working that out but I started reading a lot of French books and watching French movies and then started visiting more and more.
I was already running the website after starting it in summer 2006 and I wanted to put things down in a visual diary type of way and was keen to work in a non-linear way so that you could start at any point in a picture and it would still tell you a little story of some kind.
It started as a lot of different things but as my interest in France grew so did the number of things featuring France, then when a UK publisher rang me up last year they said there were interested in developing the work I had done about France into a book, which was great so I am working on that at the moment.
So really more and more of the stuff on the site is about France as I write things down and test ideas on the work I am doing.
Can you put your finger on what it is that draws you to Paris?
It is all sorts of things really, but what I really like is the light as it’s not as grey as England at this time of year. The light reflects off the enormous white buildings and with the white gravel in the Palais du Luxembourg and les Tuileries that reflection makes it a nice place to be, especially in the winter.
How different are the French people and characters you meet when compared to those in the UK?
I was reading a piece by a fellow illustrator recently who said it was important to travel alone as this puts you in situations where you start noticing things, which you would not see if you were with other people, or in a familiar environment.
So I think that part of the joy of going to Paris is that you notice a lot more things, I don’t think French people are any more interesting than people in the UK, but you notice slightly different things.
For example the street cleaners in Paris use these special plastic brooms that are modelled on old-fashioned brooms and they have plastic twigs, so they are going around with these fake old style brooms, which amazes me.
I like the idea that French culture is all about being on show, a little more Southern European, living your life on the outside as all the flats in Paris are so tiny that people head outdoors and meet each other for a coffee.
So you get to see quite a lot of behaviour, sometimes intimate behaviour that you do not necessarily see in England as it goes on behind closed doors.
Such things are great for an illustrator or writer when in Paris.
Have you been able to get out of Paris and visit other areas of France?
I have two children and so in the summer we head to Brittany and the seaside because it is a fantastic place, further south and it gets too hot for me. I like watching the waves, walking along the beaches of Finistere and they never get full.
Do you take your notepad onto the beach?
I do but I have to be careful not to get sand in my pen, and I take very bad photos, whereas I have seen some artists take beautiful photos mine definitely are not and are just for reference as I like to be fairly accurate on things like buildings and landscapes.
I will occasionally do drawings on the spot when in cafes but I tend to do only short sketches, although I will write more when sat in a cafe, I find it easier to do that than drawing when in such places.
In the perfect circumstances when I am drawing it has to be on a board at the perfect angle to do it well and so drawing my sketches together at a later point.
What process do you use, are you letting images trickle through your mind’s eye?
Yes, I will put a lot of different sketches and writing down and then let them percolate for a bit until an idea comes out. At the moment I am working on a piece about what it means to be in Paris on a Sunday, as I think it is different to an Anglo-Saxon Sunday (click thumbnail image right).
Whereas in England people may head out for lunch, oddly, people in France will spend their Sundays with family, not going out like the rest of the week, they won’t be off to do any shopping in a DIY store either.
I think some of that is due to the fact that you can only buy certain things on a Sunday, which is interesting to me and it is nice that the day is treated like that. I can remember when it was like that in England.
I really like the way you incorporate your sketches into your blog, and is that a Moleskine pad you use?
It is, I scan the images and then touch them up a little in Photoshop because I like the colour of the Moleskine sketchbook as it has thick paper, almost like watercolour paper, but I just use pen on it and is a good thing to use.
And you seem to intertwine your stories into the illustration.
Yes, I am writing more and more stories, when I first started I was just an illustrator but now it has become a bit of both.
So what plans are there for the book, can you give people a bit of an idea?
It is a year in Paris with a lot of illustrations, similar in style to the blog, and I am getting together all my stuff and there will be a story with it but I will be showing the things I have noticed when being in Paris.
Joanna Walsh is an illustrator and writer. Her work has appeared internationally in (amongst others) The Guardian, The Times, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, more at Badaude.