Born in the south of France in 1971 (and still a fan of Armagnac and Fiestas), now living in Paris, I'm François Launet, niknamed Goomi, works as a SFX supervisor in the Macguff Ligne company, and also as a freelance illustrator for many different projects.
After some scientific studies, I studied Art in Toulouse Fine Art School, and computer graphics in Angouleme. I was very soon interested in fantastic illustrations, and mainly influenced by H.P.Lovecraft, comic authors from the "Metal Hurlant" generation and classic painters. Passionated by mixing technics, I use digital painting, 3D, ink drawing, acrylic on canvas, photographies, airbrush or calligraphy.
As a table RPG player, I became involved in the edition world and worked on French edition of games such as Wraith and Kult. Later on, I started working with Pegasus Spiele, German editor of "Call of Cthulhu" franchise, for the Cthuloïd Welten magazine and the rulebooks.
Being a huge fan of Lovecraft (discovered through Role-playing), I tried to fix the "Unspeakable" on canva, with more or less success (and some Sanity loss). After many year of serious illustrations and paintings, Ialso created a humoristic webcomic about the Old Ones, the Gods created by HPL: The unspeakable Vault (of Doom).
As a fan of various musical movements, such as Gothic, EBM, Dark Ambiant, Heavenly voices or different form of Metal, I looked for collaborations with my favorite bands. I made some cover for the famous EBM german band :Wumpscut: and other less-known entities, visible on the "Music" Page.
Main known hobbies are: classic RPG (mainly Ars Magica), Photography, Wildlife watching, Tropical trekking, Diving, Eating and Driking (often too much), Tracking spiders, insects and frogs, drawing moons and rabbits for his daughter, among others.
This is the fourth version of this online gallery, created using Typo3 CMS.
The first version was created in 1997-1998, and evolved to the fourth stable version, built in full "hand-made" HTML. The site was very painful to update (and I spent a lot of time on the UVoD webcomic.), and became nearly dead a few years ago. I didn't have time to learn PHP, and waited very long before choosing a new engine, for easy work displaying...
Images are now displayed with convenient Lightbox plugin, replacing a poorly implemented popup system. Visitor can also still downolad images for his own usage (see Contact for terms of use)
Updates should be much easier now, with a dynamic, online Content Manager System: images can be added online, witout any additional software.
Most of the Galleries have been updated, and new works added in the according categories .
The goominet was previously kindly hosted by Mac Guff Ligne, with help from BrunoM. It now has its own storage space and domain name. The current site was built with help from Viktor B., who made the global template, based on F.Launet's images.
Though not a 'conceptual' artist (he was rather disappointed by the very conceptual teaching of Toulouse Fine Art School, in 1990-1994, and learned classical drawing/painting/anatomy mostly by himself), I've got a few strong gidelines and ideas driving his work:
Draw. Everytime.
Considering myself as a "bad drawer", having spent too much time in my life in front of a computer rather than a blank page, I try to draw everywhere, everytime: train, metro, and especially working meetings, the better place to fill up pages of necronomic studies.
Keep Records of everything.
An artist should not try to make the perfect, polished image all the time. Most of his work should be experimentations, studies, rough trials. And he must keep a track of everything, to be able to witness his own evolution, and to have a "catalog" of idea, design and exemple, to pick from. F.Launet cuts and pastes quite all of his small drawings in big books named 'Goomicronicons', a deep mine of ideas and designs.
Catharsis, not Depression
Dealing with gore, bllody images, or figuring hideous creatures is not a sign of the creator's depression. It's rather more a kind of a catharsis, a way to repeal true violence and hanger. The occult imagery is used only for its powerful impact on spectators, not for any proselytic purposes, the author being more interested by quantic physics or evolution science than religion.
A matter of Choice.
He made the choice to work in the CGI/SFX industry to earn his living. In France, being a simple illustrator is not easy, and rich ones are rather rare. Working in a stable a relatively well-paid environnement gives the author a big load of work, but it let him choose his commissioned works as illustrator - only interesting subjects being chosen.
Many ask where this 'Goomi' nickname comes from: It's a deformation of the 'gumi' japanese word, meaning garbage. F.Launet saw once a movie about japanese town built on garbage (gumi) thrown in the sea to increase lands. This concept (to grow on his own trash) was very ironic, and the word (slightly changed) was used as a 'loggin' name ('françois' is quite long to type...) at MacGuff Ligne, where it quickly became a (ridiculous) nickname. As it means "condom" in german, it implies very interesting discussion when it comes to work with foreign clients...