Words like ‘quirky’ and ‘whimsical’ get bandied about a lot with illustration, but Emmanuelle Walker’s charming portraits make you feel like you’re in a French cartoon. “Is it the stripey tops?” she suggests, in her soft Quebec accent. With her kohl-rimmed eyes, long blonde hair and button nose, Walker looks a lot like the elegant women she draws.

Walker was born in Switzerland, grew up in Montreal, studied at the renowned animation department at Les Gobelins in Paris and now lives in London. “I feel most at home here but I still have a lot to discover. I feel like I haven't even seen 5% of the city! I like the fact there are so many different kinds of people, different cultures. It’s like a huge version of Montreal.”

 

Those different kinds of people have provided the inspiration for her current exhibition called ‘Passers-By’ - canvas works of her illustrations. The female faces she sketches are based on friends, family and women she passes on the street. “Sometimes it’s a look or an outfit that I see and so I’ll take a mental picture.” The bright block backgrounds lend them an air of Alex Katz’s graphic work, but the poker faces, the passive gazes of the subjects make them reminiscent of classical portraits. “I do love the great masters of painting such as Holbein, Velazquez. I think it’s amazing how realistic their work was.”

Walker’s drawings are sketched by hand and then worked on in Photoshop - “I like digital because it’s cleaner and you can always take stuff back. The undo tool is pretty useful!”

She splits her time between animation and illustration - “with animation you can make a drawing come to life, you can do anything you like with it” - and has exciting projects in the works including character design for Disney. “But I love how sketching an illustration can be so quick. Animation is a slow process. I think that’s why these portraits are so stiff and static. I wanted to do something different to my film work.”

What advice would she give to budding illustrators? “Draw all the time. Try stuff out in your sketchbooks. Explore different mediums - at the moment I’m really enjoying marker pens. And get inspired by other things in the world rather than just other people’s illustrations.”

 

For her next project, Walker’s turning her inscrutable gaze onto a notoriously inscrutable disease.  “I’m trying to find funding for a short film about Alzheimer’s. I wanted to explore it in a poetic, imaginary way but also have a scientific element to it.  I find it fascinating how your memory erases from the end. It winds back.”

Talking of going back in time, Walker’s also been working on a children’s book. “It’s an A-Z of birds. It took me a year to draw from the first thumbnails but now I can recognise birds on the street. I’m like ‘Ooh there’s a finch!’”

But what work of art would she most like to own if money was no object? Velazquez’s portrait of the Infanta? A Holbein original? “The other day I went to the Print Fair at the Royal Academy and there was this Andy Warhol drawing of a cat. Sam The Cat it was called. He would’ve looked great in my apartment.”