COMICS Introducing Penny & Inka

 

Introducing the team behind Words & Pictures' upcoming Penny & Inka comic — Tibo Torelli, Sarah Lovell, Penny Taylor, and Julie Stephen.

Penny & Inka is a semi-regular comic strip, a funny take on the ups and downs of writing and illustrating for children! The idea behind it is for SCBWI writers and illustrators to volunteer and collaborate on the series and to get their work published in Words & Pictures. If you’re interested, let us know by emailing Shannon Ell at illustrators@britishscbwi.org or Tibo Torelli at scotland@britishscbwi.org

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His passport is British, his accent is French, his name is Italian and his drama is Korean. Tibo lives in Stirling and joined SCBWI in March 2022. He recently became one of Scotland's Network Organisers. He has been writing since the age of 10 and pursued a career as a scriptwriter in London for 12 years before moving to Scotland. He writes picture books –the perfect media for his stories – he is in awe of illustrators and how they can visually tell a story and he enjoys the challenge of writing a complete story in a few words.

Sarah is a British illustrator. She has loved to draw for as long as she can remember. After studying art to a degree level, she now creates illustrations for picture books using a mixture of traditional and digital media. Her main inspirations are nature, wildlife, and magic. 

Follow her on Instagram and Twitter
www.sarahlovellart.co.uk

Penny was born and raised in rural Gloucestershire and moved to Lancashire in her twenties. Art and animals have always been the leading two interests in her life. Having volunteered to help with the SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine comic strips, she created some roughs for the two characters Penny, (coincidentally named), and McCauley, very loosely based on people she knows. It was felt by the team that the McCauley strip worked well in its rough form 

so, apart from adding some frames, it was kept as it was. The Penny strip was worked up into colour and refined, so more in keeping with her usual illustrative style. She has used a combination of Procreate, (for the initial composition and final colouring), and pen and ink. She also enjoys lino printing.

Her work can be found on Facebook and her website here.

Julie Stephen is a freelance illustrator, printmaker, and visual arts tutor, who self-published her debut storybook: Oh Smelly Sock Stew in 2022.  She moved to Scotland as a child and studied fine art at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, before teaching art and design in Dumfries & Galloway, south-west Scotland, for 20 years. She embarked on her freelance artist illustrator journey in 2021, using her lifelong love of drawing, her skills from her degree studies, and practical experiences working within art education, to create quirky characters, inky illustrations, and bold prints. Julie enjoys experimenting with mark-making and combining a range of different materials to create her work, including gel plate printing and pen and ink drawings. 

Her work can be found on Facebook and Instagram.

*Header image: Sarah Lovell; Inspiration image: Penny Taylor; Blue moustache image: Julie Stephen

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Shannon Ell is the Illustration Features Editor of Words & Pictures. Find their work at www.shannonillustrates.com. Follow them on Instagram and Twitter. Contact them at illustrators@britishscbwi.org