🎨 The Artist Behind the Lines
SÉBASTIEN RIEU
FRENCH ARTIST.
BORDEAUX.
25 years drawing faces that make people laugh, wince, and recognise themselves. Caricaturist, illustrator, watercolourist — Sébastien works with Indian ink and a brush, the old-fashioned way, in a studio in Bordeaux. No AI. No shortcuts. Just a very sharp pen and a very good eye.
[ GIF — café terrace drawing ]
THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN
Sébastien Rieu is a French caricature artist and illustrator based in Bordeaux, with over 25 years of professional drawing experience. He trained in the classic French BD (bande dessinée) tradition — high contrast, expressive line, bold characterisation — and has applied that sensibility to everything from editorial illustration to bespoke portrait commissions.
He is not a street artist. You won’t find him in a tourist market with a fixed price list and a queue of cruise passengers. Sébastien works at café terraces, drawing for the pleasure of it — and when a face catches his eye, he completes a caricature and offers it as a spontaneous gift to the person, especially children and women whose elegance or expression strikes him as worth capturing.
That same spirit — observation, generosity, irreverence — goes into every commissioned portrait. He draws faces the way a novelist writes characters: with something true in the exaggeration.
His work spans Indian ink caricature, watercolour portraiture, acrylic painting, and BD-style illustration. He also paints hand-lettered signs and restaurant chalkboards on commission.
— Sébastien Rieu
STYLE & TECHNIQUE
🖊️ INDIAN INK CARICATURE
The foundation of Sébastien’s practice. A dip pen, Indian ink, and the ability to make a face recognisable in three strokes. The BD (bande dessinée) tradition at its most concentrated.
🎨 WATERCOLOUR PORTRAITURE
Transparency, luminosity, and the risk of a wash that can’t be undone. Sébastien uses watercolour to bring warmth and life to portraits — from café terrace sketches to large-format commissions.
🖌️ ACRYLIC PAINTING
Bold, saturated, permanent. Acrylic allows the kind of scale and chromatic intensity that watercolour cannot. Used for pin-up works, large portraits, and pieces meant to dominate a wall.
📖 BD / COMICS LINE
25 years of working within the French comic-strip tradition has shaped everything — the confidence of the outline, the economy of the expression, the joy in distortion. It shows in every commission.
WANT YOUR FACE DRAWN?
One photo is all it takes. Sébastien does the rest — sketch, ink, colour, delivery.