French artist Amandine Urruty's illustrations are wonderfully bizarre

There’s something charmingly bizarre about Amandine Urruty’s illustrations. Like Victorian portraits, the French artist’s characters sit quietly, are well-behaved and have excellent posture but the subjects and the commotion that surrounds them is what makes them so interesting.

Each picture is drawn using graphite and the detail and imagination is fascinating with all sorts of weird and wonderful imagery crammed in. One child has a disco ball for a head, another is surrounded by miniature squashes and tiny, balloon-headed people and various others wear grotesque masks. Amandine’s style is so beautiful that she brings this odd sense of normality – we accept these characters completely but the curiosity they conjure is what draws us into Amandine’s strange but genteel world.