Sophie Tonielli’s story will speak to all those whose passion has caught up with them while they thought it was asleep. However, the path seemed clear for the woman who grew up in Essonne in the early 90s, alongside Asterix and Lucky Luke, and whose drawing quickly proved to be her main activity. A few years later, she will experience the arrival of manga and their aesthetic as “a revolution”.
“I felt that drawing had never left me”
As a young adult, Sophie Tonielli consistently integrated the Fine Arts of Orléans. “That’s where I branched off, traces the now thirty-year-old, from the apartment she occupies today in Niort. I found it too academic and elitist, so I went into sociology. » Ten years pass without the young woman ever touching a felt-tip pen or a drawing pad. “I no longer had any desires or ideas. » She has since made up for it.
Sophie Tonielli in the workshop she has set up in her apartment in the Tour Chabot-Gavacherie district of Niort.
© (Photo NR, Camille Montagnon)
As for many, the arrival of Covid constituted a major turning point in the life of Sophie Tonielli, then a professional integration advisor in the Paris region, after a previous position in human resources. We are now in 2020. “I find myself pregnant, confined at home with my partner, thinking about changing cities, my life”remembers the one who then left the Paris region to move to Deux-Sèvres.
I find myself pregnant, confined at home with my partner, thinking about changing cities, my life.
Sophie Tonielli, author and illustrator Niort
“That’s when I got back into drawing, she says, four years later. It was very powerful. I felt like it never left me.”. Refresher training in drawing later, the young mother launched into children’s illustration. In 2022, she publishes online The rainbow whalehis first children’s book. A year later, appears The boy who didn’t want to sleepsold in around a hundred copies via Amazonwhose drawings and text she signs.
Comics and rabbit ears
At the same time, the neo-Niortaise invests Instagram, where nearly a thousand subscribers follow her. Over the months, “I saw my drawing evolve, gain precision and maturity”until the idea emerged of freeing himself from children’s illustration to return to his first loves: manga and comics. At the end of February 2025, it should complete the final box ofHappy bunny girla comic book whose heroine wears a hat with rabbit ears.
Under pop and colorful outlines, the work takes a look “acerbic”that of an eccentric young woman, who “does not feel in tune with the world around him”. Should we see a resemblance to its designer? Knowing that the person concerned has a cat ears hat, we are entitled to ask ourselves the question.
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