About
Observe, draw, pass it on.
Isabelle Mellah draws the places, characters and moments that catch her attention. Her work moves between travel sketchbooks, illustration, painting, caricature and freer practices, always with the same intention: letting line and colour tell a story.
Illustrator, live caricaturist and art workshop teacher.
Looking before depicting
A building glimpsed from a street, a posture, an animal, a coastal landscape or an almost invisible detail can all become the starting point of a drawing. Isabelle works from this attention to the real, then lets the image move towards narrative, humour or imagination.
Many paths, the same hand
Drawing, watercolour, painting, illustration, manga, caricature and travel sketchbooks are not treated as separate territories. Each technique opens a different way of building an image, working the material and finding one's own rhythm.
The same hand moves from a sketchbook filled on a quayside to a plate destined for a book, then to a face caught in a few lines in front of the person sitting for it. What travels from one practice to the next is not a technique: it is a way of looking, and then of choosing what deserves to be kept.
Children's illustration of a bird in flight above the coast.Conguel à tire d'aile — original French title 
Watercolour study of an orangutan, exploring texture and transparency.Orang-outan, aquarelle — original French title 
Drawn character: a figure held in line alone.Élégante italienne — original French title
Learning without standardising
In her workshops, people draw, paint and work with watercolour, illustration, manga and modelling, each on a project of their own.
Progress always follows the same movement: look for a long time, try without fear of getting it wrong, understand why a gesture worked, then begin again differently. A personal voice emerges more slowly than a recipe — but it stays.
Key facts
- Who it is for
- Children from age 6, teenagers, adults.
- Workshops
- Regular sessions in Gleizé and Villeneuve.
- Artistic training
- École Émile Cohl, Lyon: illustration, comics and animation.
Work produced in the studio. Only protected web reproductions are shown here.
A path, not a straight line
Isabelle discovered the pleasure of drawing as a teenager, then set her pencils aside. She came back to them at twenty-eight and never let go: a sketchbook in her bag, journeys sketched on the spot, caricatures of the people around her. After training as an environmental engineer, she changed direction and studied illustration, comics and animation at École Émile Cohl in Lyon, before going on to draw live at events.
