Océane Muller’s bizarre illustrations are inspired by poems, tales and medieval art

One glance at the work of Océane Muller – who also goes by the pseudonym Ortie Rouge – and it’s pretty obvious that she gets her inspiration from poems, tales and legends. It’s creative and utterly spellbinding, where spiritual beings and creatures float amongst a sea of magical patterns, luminous line drawings and colour. It’s not a replication of reality either – in fact it’s far from it. And when she’s not striving for fantasy, the French illustrator looks at fashion, medieval art, “illuminated” manuscripts or engravings on ceremonial armour. “Like many teenagers of my generation,” she says, “I started drawing by copying manga pages and, when video games arrived, I started to question the world.”

Océane currently lives in Moulins-les-Metz, which sits next to Metz, a city with a rich medieval architectural identity that, naturally, inspires much of her life and art. After moving there in her younger years – when she was of a “shy nature” – she took refuge in comics and manga, plus films and animations. Resultantly, drawing became something wanted to pursue. Now, she’s studying at ENSAD in Nancy, France, where she flits between graphic design and illustration. And even if her portfolio says otherwise, she thinks she “still has a long way to go” in terms of reaching her goals.

Speaking of her latest accomplishments, Océane states how her best-loved artworks are always the ones she completed last. A typical scenario for any working creative, really, it’s often hard to look back on your own work and think of it fondly. The three most recent are part of a series of atmospheres, coined together and therefore entitled Set of Three. Doing more or less what it says on the tin, the series is presented with a theatrical, cinema-like border while the obscure environments take centre stage. The first appears to be set in the sea, the second a bubbly world and the third a raining land of lava; each has a gem stone creature placed in the centre. “I looked for a cinematic and contemplative aspect, with this idea to have a freeze frame,” she tells It’s Nice That.

Another work, named Troubadour, was conceived off her research into graphic narration in the context of adapted novels, plays and music. Graphic narration is a technique used to grab a reader’s attention visually and spatially, where gestures, space and structure illustrates the storyline. In this piece, Océane uses minimal text and a cluster of panels to depict flowers falling from its branch, melting away until the petals land into a pair of hands. The second part of Troubadour sees a subject crying tears of red, which are jewel-like in their composition and bizarrely surreal. “I tried to place the image at the centre of my practice by constituting silent narrations on the decomposition of a movement,” she explains; “an action with little or no text.”

In other news, Océane also collaborated with the team at Golgotha graphic design studio for the magazine In Corpore San, devised during her internship there. Accompanying an article titled Net positive healing nature through fashion by Thomas Mondémé, the piece looks at regenerative agriculture. Of course, Océane put her own spin on the illustration: “the fantasy of making something extremely baroque allowed us to be inspired directly by the composition of medieval manuscripts,” she says. This, plus all of her works proceeding, proves that Océane is an illustrator who knows her own language; it’s imaginative and mature beyond its years, especially for a soon-to-be graduate.