Survey the place
The whole square is drawn first: stairs, ramps, façades, street furniture. The backdrop stands up on its own, with nobody in it.
The author · workshop file
Lionel Euphrasie
Trained as an architect. Skater. Draughtsman.
There are two ways to look at a square. The architect's — where these stairs start, how that railing holds, what the fall of the paving is. And the skater's — where to go through, where to put a wheel down, what line joins one end of the square to the other.
Headless Man was born where the two meet. The places are surveyed with the precision of a drawing, and crossed with the appetite of someone hunting a line.
“A page is a survey first.
The character comes after.”
The two moves
Survey it, then cross it.
Architect's side
A station, a forecourt, a set of thermal baths, a Haussmann square: every backdrop is built like a survey. The stairs have the right number of steps, the ramps the right fall, the façades their real rhythm. That's why you recognise the places — and it's trade knowledge, not styling.
Skater's side
A line is then laid over that survey: the trajectory. The character doesn't cross the scene just anywhere, he links it up — a staircase, a ledge, a ramp, a railing. Every position is its own drawing, and the run of positions draws the movement, like a motion study.
Proof in three steps
From sketchbook to page.
Every page starts in a sketchbook, in ink. Here is Part-Dieu station at three stages: the hand-drawn double page, the cleaned-up line, then the colour laid on. Tap an image to see it large.
The wall
The attempts you keep.
Before the finished page come the studies: the same trick run ten times over until the line actually holds up.
The tool
The flip book
tells the truth.
Before a line goes onto a finished page, you need to know whether it holds. That's what the pad is for: you draw the movement frame by frame, thumb through it, and you see straight away what's wrong — a missing weight shift, a rotation that's too quick, a landing that can't happen.
It's the rough draft of movement.
Nothing else does the job.
What the pages show
Four stages.
Draw the line
A trajectory crosses the survey left to right, linking the obstacles in an order that actually works.
Break it down
The trajectory is cut into positions. Each one is a separate drawing — sometimes sixty for a single page.
Lay the colour
The green shirt, the grey jeans, the turquoise shoes: the same outfit throughout, so your eye can keep track of him.
Details
- Training
- Architect
- Workshop
- Gerzat, Puy-de-Dôme, France
- Work
- Headless Man
- Scope
- 12 cities · 10 districts each · 120 sequences
- Sketchbooks
- Flip book no. 1
- @_headlessman
- Headless Man