Louis Loizeau

Louis Loizeau is an illustrator in Beijing, and a student at Tsinghua University. She works across illustration, animation and ceramic design. The through-line is character: figures she has invented, then kept drawing until they can walk from a still picture into motion.

Two of those figures have names. Rachel and Lucifer Blanc are original characters, not one-off mascots. In her pictures they wear the room — costume, gesture, a face held long enough to become a person. She posts as @hurricanetai, and her public bio is a clean brief: she draws original characters, and AI is not allowed. That is worth taking at her word. The work you can see is handmade character design, ornate and theatrical, closer to a private opera than to a moodboard.

In November 2024 she said, in public, that she was designing a series of tarot cards, and she has been showing parts of the pack as she goes. Cards that have appeared include The Tower, Death, The Hanged Man, The Sun, The Moon, The Star and Two of Wands. The old titles stay; the cast is hers. It is a series in progress, not a finished deck announced with a publisher, and that honesty is part of the pleasure. You are watching someone build a world card by card, one ornate costume at a time, without pretending the pack is already in shops.

What we do not add is a prize she does not have. There is no verified “American Illustration Society” honour in her record, and it should stay off the page. What remains is enough: a Tsinghua student making pictures in Beijing; characters with names; animation as a way those names can move; ceramic as another surface a figure can live on; a tarot in the making. Meet Rachel. Meet Lucifer Blanc. Stay for the next card.