Good day to all you lovely people! We hope you had a great week, and if not, we hope you sent us your FML! We are all very excited because something amazing is going to happen on the 9th of June. As you may or may not know, Fmylife is releasing a book! And besides the Bible, what's a book without illustrations? Not much, and that's why you'll see in the Fmylife book some never-seen-before illustrations created especially by Marie Levesque, also known as Missbean,
who is honoring us with her presence today !

Missbean is 26, she’s an illustrator from Paris, France. Two years ago, after 3 years studying architecture in Paris, she decided to stop everything to apply herself full time to drawing. She started her own website, helped by her boyfriend Florent, who's not only helping her with the technical stuff, but who's also now her muse. That's right, "Ma vie à deux", meaning "Me and my relationship" in French, is an autobiographical website, mainly based on her love-life, which pretty quickly gained some popularity.

In September of 2008, this young artist was published for the first time on Viedemerde.fr, the French version of Fmylife.com. Of course, she had no idea this adventure would still be ongoing six months after that, at 3700 miles from her hometown! In New-York, March 2009, in the headquarters of Random House, a finger points at a file titled "Missbean". This finger belongs to Ryan Doherty, the editor in charge of the project. He just selected Missbean to be the illustrator of the FML book, out of three other potential artists.

"As soon as the FML crew mentioned the idea of illustrating the book, I replied 'Yes, yes, yes!' I was very excited about this idea! It was great news to hear that I'd been the one that Ryan chose!"

And the die is cast! A few weeks later, she received a copy of the FML book, and started reading it immediately. Her job was then to select some stories and illustrate them.

"At first, it was very hard for me to choose. All these stories were so funny, my boyfriend and I were laughing day and night. But I had to make a choice, so I picked my favorite stories and started illustrating them pretty quickly.”

Marie has had the opportunity to illustrate for both the FML and VDM websites. We asked her whether she saw a difference between the English and French stories.

“Well, by reading the book I noticed that the FML stories were more extreme than the VDM ones, the people on FML are not afraid to talk about weird situations and I absolutely love the way they talk about them, the way they play with words is fascinating."

And so Missbean set about creating her illustrations. Don't be fooled by her falsely naive drawing style, the subjects that she's dealing with are definitely not childish. In fact, one of her next projects is a book about ecology, which will be released in September of 2009. She's proud of this project because it's a theme she particularly cares about, in fact, tired of being in a big polluted city, she's going to move with her boyfriend and her two cats to live in the countryside, far away from noise, exhaust fumes and stress.

One last question for Missbean: why did she choose this particular FML?

"I chose this one because it made me laugh! That's it... what, do you need another reason? "

Actually we don't! That's a pretty good reason! Thank you Missbean for today's illustration and for all the book's illustrations!

Don't forget to check her website: http://www.leszillusdemissbean.com/

Okay people, concentration needed here. We know it's a been a tough time due to Adam not making it to the top, but life still goes on, so stop voting to save him, it's useless now. But if you really need to move your fingers, and if you want to be our next published artist, you can send an email right now to alice@fmylife.com !