Cali Rezo is a French artist who works digitally in Photoshop.

She concentrates largely on faces, either direct portraits, or somewhat stylized portraits in which she sometimes plays with drawing the eyes larger than normal, giving the faces, particularly those of children, a doll-like effect. She will also often incorporate a graphic background rather than a naturalistic one, making a nice blend of portrait and design.

You can see examples of that in the section of her online gallery devoted to personal work, where you will also find a fascinating series of self-portraits.

My favorites, which you will also find on that page, are her “Klimteries”, a series of paintings inspired by the designs/paintings of Gustav Klimt, as in the examples above.

Her portfolio also contains examples of her professional work, illustrations for magazines and agencies.

Rezo works from photographs that she takes herself and considers the photography part of the artistic process, although she doesn’t use the photograph directly in her paintings. Like many digital painters, she follows a painting process that is remarkably like that for traditional media, from initial sketches to a more refined drawing, blocking in color and then adding detail and working to a finished state.

She does, however, utilize photography directly for her collage works, which you can find on her Info page.

You can find articles on her working process from the French editions of Computer Arts and Mac Universe magazines in the “Making Of” section.

Although the “How-to” articles are in French, her site is more or less bi-lingual. There are English translations for most of the text and English speakers will have little problem finding their way around.

Rezo also has a blog called On the other side of the rocks.