Q: Originally from France, what are some of your favorite places to be?

A: I was born in France, and came to New York in 1969. I now live with my wife Linda, in Southern Connecticut. My favorite places are New York City, and the town of La Charité on the river Loire, where I lived when I was very young. 

Q: Do you keep a sketchbook? What is the balance between the art you create on paper versus in the computer? 

A: I episodically keep an illustrated travel dairy, and I have a small book where I collect visual ideas and small comic strips I do by strictly following free associations, with no censorship and no editing. I also try to keep a sketchbook of drawings I want nobody to see. Interestingly I just lost it. I always draw on paper, before coloring, and revising in Photoshop. 

Q: What do you like best about your workspace? Do you think it needs improvement, if so, what would you change? 

A: Over the years, the essential quality of my successive studios has been about having an unobstructed view of the rising or the setting sun (with a preference for the East). If there is any improvement to be made, it is about my uncontrollable clutter. But perhaps, it is part of the creative process. 

Q: How do you organize an assignment before you start drawing? Do you make lists and thumbnails? 

A: To illustrate a story, I pay attention first to the title, then I go to the conclusion. If nothing comes out from this first overview, I highlight the key words in the text, and I do a lot of doodles. It took me a lot of practice to not get discouraged by the many bad ideas that come up before anything interesting finally manifests. In any case, the process is not pleasant, lasting a few seconds, or for agonizing hours. 

Q: How do you know when the art is finished? 

A: Too often, it is the deadline that decides. About less than a third of all my artwork gives me real satisfaction. I even keep an archival box entitled “Box of Horrors”. For some reason, I am holding on these embarrassing pieces. 

Q: What was the strangest or most unusual assignment you’ve taken? 

A: After a few years of illustrating stories written by somebody else, I was challenged to the highly unusual offer of total freedom to write and illustrate a children’s book. It was a true revelation when I discovered that I was an author. 

Q: What was your favorite book as a child? What is the best book you’ve recently read? 

A: When I was about seven, I read moral tales, illustrated with terrible images of punishment. Carved in my memory is that man who, at night was stealing the wood of a neighbor, and was swallowed whole by the moon, which had witnessed his crime. After that, there were the Charles Perrault’s tales, with illustrations of children being chased and eaten by ogres, and witches ending up in pits full of snakes. It was scary and fascinating at the same time. 

I just finished The Sculptor by Scott McCloud, a graphic novel about the splendor and agony of aiming to be a great artist, and a lover. I am now reading Somerset Maugham’s Stanger in Paris, about the initiation of a young inexperienced Englishman in a place of dangerous opportunities. 

Q: If you had to choose one medium to work in for an entire year, eliminating all the others, what medium would you choose? 

A: I would venture in a totally unknown field, and that would be music on the computer (which I would have to learn by using). Although it would be more accurate to define my idea of music as controlled noise.

Q: If you could time travel to any era, any place, where would you go? 

A: I’d love to see what will happen to humans, centuries from now. But as an observer, because I would be unable to meet the technological challenges, and possibly the moral issues, of the time. 

Q: What are some of your favorite places/books/blogs/websites for inspiration? 

A: Nothing matches the excitement of visiting great artwork in museums, and encountering the unexpected in small galleries. Everything then seems possible. I have been most inspired by movies about music, musicians and composers (the last one I saw was “Seymour” about the pianist Seymour Bernstein), but rarely about painters. 

I am still thrilled by some comic strips, especially those produced in France, where “la bande dessinée” is considered to be the Ninth Art. 

Q: What was the painting or drawing or film that most affected your approach to art? 

A: It took me years to take seriously my passion for comic strips when I was a boy.The work of Hergé, creator of the adventures of Tintin and Milou, with his smart narratives, the fluidity of the simple line drawings, colored in flat and beautiful tones (likely inspired by Japanese prints), constituted the foundation for my own work, when I finally became an illustrator. 

Q: What would be your last supper? 

A: With my father, asking him the questions I couldn’t ask him, before he died in an accident. This over some dry goat cheese from the region of Chavignol, with the local white wine of Sancerre. 

Guy Billout is a French artist and illustrator. He finished his art training in the French city of Beaune. Afterwards he worked in advertising for a few years before moving to New York City in 1969. It was there he found success when he was published in New York Magazine.

Billout's aesthetic style is clean and spare, sometimes incorporating some ironic element. His work has been featured in Atlantic Monthly magazine and in a number of books, including a collection of Greek mythology.

Billout's client list history includes The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Oprah, Travel & Leisure, Business Week, Fortune, Time. Billout also has won several awards including Hamilton King; The New York Times ten best illustrated children's books, 1973, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2007.