Anatomy and animals
On June 15, 2025, during the end-of-year festival organized by Apolline in Etoy, families wander between shows, workshops, and live music. In the middle of a space dedicated to visual arts, on large white boards, the drawing of 10-year-old Émilie catches the eye. Just a year ago, her passion mostly lived in front of videos. Today, it’s out in the open for everyone to see.
A small festival where drawings come to life
Under the tents and inside the rooms, local families mingle with Apolline students. You can hear a theater rehearsal on one side, a music workshop on the other, children laughing, parents taking photos. In a space reserved for visual arts, large white boards covered in drawings form a kind of pop-up gallery. Among them, 10-year-old Émilie’s drawing, created in her drawing class, stands out. Her teacher, Jérémie, is there, along with other Apolline teachers. You can recognize their way of encouraging kids to proudly show their work.
When a passion starts behind a screen
Before coming to Apolline, Émilie’s drawing mostly happened at home, in front of videos she watched “all the time, all the time, all the time.” She wasn’t watching just anything: tutorials, technical videos, explanations about anatomy. Seeing this passion focused only on screens, her mom decided to offer her a different space to express it: she enrolled her in a drawing class at Apolline. That decision marked a quiet but decisive turning point. Émilie’s curiosity didn’t change, but it found a concrete place to unfold, with paper, pencils, other kids, and a teacher who pays attention to her pace.
From tutorials to the studio: learning, then inventing
Émilie still loves watching videos to understand how bodies are constructed or how to place a hand, but she mainly uses them as a technical foundation. Very quickly, she prefers to take inspiration from them “on her own” rather than simply copying. Session after session at Apolline, she adds new drawing concepts to that base, explores different subjects, and experiments with ways of composing an image. The class with Jérémie offers her a regular, professional, and welcoming structure: a place where you learn techniques, but are also encouraged to develop your own universe. She can ask questions, try things, make mistakes, and start over. Her artistic practice steps out of the screen and settles into a weekly appointment that she can call her own.
Hats, realistic animals, and Vans: a style that’s truly hers
What Émilie loves drawing most are animals and accessories. She approaches animals in a realistic way, paying close attention to shapes and details. For characters, she naturally leans toward manga. One day, she takes part in a drawing contest with several challenges: inventing chibi and kawaii animals, drawing manga characters from models, copying a painting. She’s asked to follow instructions but add her own twist. Émilie fully embraces that freedom: she changes the colors, adds accessories, draws a hat she still remembers, watches, Vans, earrings. Everything she loves ends up finding a place on the page. Her visual universe takes shape step by step, somewhere between technical demands and the freedom to customize every detail.
One year later, a drawing on the big white boards
A year after she enrolled, Émilie’s journey is literally visible on the big white boards at ApollineFest, the end-of-year festival in Etoy. Her drawing is no longer just an image kept in a sketchbook or in the memory of a video: it’s part of an exhibition alongside other students’ work, in a place where people walk by, comment, and marvel. Around her, performances follow one another, music fills the air, and workshops are packed; her drawing, meanwhile, stays right there, silent but very much present. By choosing a drawing class that matched her passion, her mom gave her more than an activity: she offered her a space to grow, be supported, and feed her desire to create. And on that day in Etoy, a whole festival became the backdrop for that story.