Yé Wei (aka Esquissewei) is a French mangaka and the author of Astral. He founded Manga Dojo, an online drawing school, and is currently working on his second book. In this feature, he takes us on a tour of his art studio as part of our Artist in Residence series.
My studio is about 30 square metres, and it has a slightly odd history: it used to be two bedrooms – mine and my older brother’s – in my parents’ house just outside Paris, until we knocked the wall through. My brother’s bed is still in here, and I’ll come back to why that matters.
The space is split in two. On one side, everything digital: a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 hooked up to a MacBook Pro M2 Max, running Clip Studio Paint [see the best digital art software – ed]. For manga specifically, nothing else comes close – the pen stabilisation, the panel tools, the screentones, it’s all built for exactly what I do.
All three screens are running my own drawings. When I’m working on my new manga I want my previous pages permanently in front of me, so I’m always referencing myself rather than hunting through folders.
The desk itself is custom-built: two and a half metres of solid wood worktop weighing around 100kg, which is not something you move on a whim. It's rated for 300kg of load. I had it built to carry everything at once: Mac, PC, drawing setup and the full streaming rig, without a single wobble.
I built the computer myself, and I’d be lying if I said it was purely for work – I’m a lifelong geek and gamer. The water-cooling loop was a project in itself. When I need to reset my eye before going back to a page, this is where I go.
On the other side, everything traditional, and this is where things get out of hand. I own more than 3,000 markers. Not a typo. Plus dozens and dozens of nibs, pencils and screentone sheets. I’m an ambassador for a few art brands, including Clairefontaine and Graph’it, so material arrives constantly and I ran out of places to put it.
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This is my second desk, dedicated entirely to traditional work, with the marker and liner wall standing right in front of it. Everything is arranged so I can reach any colour without standing up or breaking concentration – that’s the whole point. I sit down here and just sink into the drawing. After a morning of screens, the smell of alcohol markers is what tells my brain it’s time to make something with my hands
Everything now lives in labelled boxes, because otherwise I’d never find anything again. There’s a third layer to the room too: I’ve been shooting photo and video since 2011, and I still use that gear every day.
A Sony FX30, a Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic and big continuous softboxes – the proper studio kind – because I film courses and live critique sessions for my drawing school, and for the 550,000 people who follow the channel.
I sit on an HBADA X7, which has built-in massage, heating and ventilation – it sounds ridiculous until you’ve spent six straight hours inking a page.
Next to me is a manga library of over a thousand volumes that I raid constantly for reference, plus copies of my own manga, Astral. My day is very rigid. Up at 5:30, sport at 6, at my desk by 7. If I start at 8 I feel like I’ve already lost the day – which is ridiculous, but there it is. I work until noon, then my energy collapses, so I sleep from 2pm to 3:30pm.
That’s what the bed is for. It’s the single most important piece of furniture in the room. Cutting the day in half is non negotiable. Back at it until 6 or 7pm, then in bed by 10. I’m obsessively organised. Clean desk, batteries charged, every pen where it should be, or I feel half-lost before I’ve started.
The biggest lesson? For years I called myself a mangaka online and quietly felt like a fraud, because I was teaching manga without having published one. Then Astral came out in 2025 and the impostor syndrome simply vanished. I’m on my second book now.
Astral is the story of Nejma, a young woman searching for meaning, and Elane, a druidess, who are bound by Merlin’s lost grimoire as ancient Celtic legends come to life.
I was 40 when it came out, and I’d spent years teaching manga online while quietly wondering whether I had the right to – this book is what settled that question, for good.
This is an illustration of Sana, a character from the Astral universe, drawn in Clip Studio Paint.
I'm a serious figure collector: 12 large-scale statues and a small army of smaller ones. Owning them is a childhood dream made literal – as a kid these were completely out of reach, and now I get to work inside the universe that made me want to draw in the first place. They’re also genuinely useful for lighting and anatomy reference.
Gohan is my favourite character in all of manga. He’s the kid who inherits enormous potential and has to decide what to do with it, and every single day he pushes me to go and build my own version of that.
Nami is on my desk because we share one very specific trait: an excellent sense of direction. Whenever I travel with friends, I’m always the one navigating – nobody else even tries anymore.
Apprendre à Dessiner des Mangas is a practical guide book designed for those who truly want to learn to draw – not just watch tutorials, but pick up a pencil and get started.
You can see more of Yé's work on his website.
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