Lucie Penaud

Lucie Penaud, an illustrator and comic artist who graduated from the Haute école des arts du Rhin (DNSEP 2025), wields gentleness and kindness as creative forces. With a keen eye and fine line work, she captures her surroundings with accuracy, infusing them with dreamy colors and the poetry of clear lines. Her images, wrapped in imagination, speak directly to the eyes, blending modernity with synesthetic memories without nostalgia.

Penaud’s work often draws from the tradition of Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l'Oye and La Fontaine’s fables, where animals master human language with skill. She imagines speaking with members of non-human species to discover radically different perceptions. Approaching comics from a visual rather than literary standpoint, she uses text in small touches to express characters’ thoughts or give them voice, remaining fascinated by the sequence of fixed images while exploring text-image dynamics more deeply.

Violet recurs throughout her palette, bringing rhythm to chromatic compositions while evoking dreams and the supernatural. Japanese prints and the Nabis movement influence her work deeply, particularly their vivid colors and image composition. Her inspiration emerges from a holistic dynamic: walking with attentive eyes, visiting exhibitions, reading books with or without images, and watching films.

Among her significant projects, D.I.L.D./W.I.L.D. follows a character through tribulations between dream and reality, published in risography by Pain Perdu. Les neurones miroirs, appearing in an upcoming collective fanzine, marks her first confrontation with horror comics through work on facial expression and its absence. Currently, she is developing a children’s book based on Andersen’s Poucette, where disrupted scales render the miniature girl more vulnerable, offering new perspectives on composition and narration useful for future projects.