Peter de Sève: new website

Peter de Sève’s delightfully whimsical, wonderfully styled and beautifully rendered illustrations have become familiar to readers of The New Yorker, for which he has done a number of memorable covers, and other publications like Newsweek, Time, Smithsonian and Atlantic Monthly.

Since I last wrote about him De Sève’s website has been revised and expanded, and now includes a delightful selection of sketches, as well as a section of his visual development art for films.

In addition there is a flip-through preview of his new book A Sketchy Past (though it suffers from one of those annoyingly cutesy page-flipping interfaces).

In addition to my Amazon link above, the book, along with four other Peter de Sève titles, can be ordered from Stuart Ng Books via links from artist’s site.

De Sève has also continued to update his blog, with posts about work in progress, preliminary sketches for New Yorker covers, character development sketches and more.

De Sève blends a cartoonist’s knack for wry humor and visually charming exaggerations with a watercolorist’s command of subtle colors, carefully controlled values and loosely elegant rendering.

His portrayal of animals, large and small, is particularly delightful. He gives them more character than many illustrators give to their images of people.