We were lucky to catch up with Lutin Karau recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lutin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I am a webcomic author for a decade, now, and I’ve been showing my work during IRL events. Sadly, having a webcomic when you are showing your art offline is frustrating : people will not have internet at the moment so reading the comic is impossible, they will most likely forget to check it, a paywall is always a big step to take for the users… Comments on my work are few and far between. I always try to find ideas to share extracts of my work during events (dlyers, homemade zines), I even show my processes and technics on Youtube so I can have more eyes on me. It’s a lot of work and seeing other artists with cooks on their booth is impressive.
I started wanting to have my book.
Ok, I started in 2019 with The Little Horsanthology, an artbook with mythological horses and their stories. But it’s not a comic yet. I tried to make a comic I could print with my webtoon “ALED ! Je suis Humain !” (french for “HALP ! I’m Human !”), a story about a dragon denying villagers better conditions who got punished by being transfromed… into a Human just like them. This project was meant to go out as a big comic, full color with an artstyle inspired by medieval art after about 2 years of work. It failed ! After drawing 20 pages… my backup hard drive locked itself for security reasons after i tried to plug it to an other computer and I could never get my early work back. I was saddened.
I continued this project, wanting to finish something.
And Once it was finished…
I had nothing to work through…
Until…
I decided I would create a fancomic, changing the characters into fairies and mermaids. A friend gave me random ideas until the idea became too big for just fanarts so I created my own characters, I fused my worlds and started working on “Le Chant de la Rivière” (“The Song from the River”).
I set my goal ! I want a beautiful book, hard cover and gold hot stamping, full color, 70 pages before october ! Starting 2024, I worked on the story, by March I started working on the art. This year was not so calm : I went to a ball in Versailles and I bought a home for myself, everything changed. But I succeded ! Working to finish 3 pages a week when I could have access to my computer was hard. I started waking up 1 hour early to be able to have at least this time to draw while the rest of my freetime was stuck in chores, caring for my cats, sometimes myself, and seeing friends…
And by the end of semptember… I had all the comic pages done.
I could print my comic.
I still did some errors because it’s so rare I finish a project but, I have a hardcover with gold comic book to sell and it’s so satisfying.
I’m up for my next comic project while working on !

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am an independant webcomic author. I started drawing thanks to animations studios and particularly Dreamworks during their 2D era (Spirit, in my heart), the Winx club and also mangas like Naruto, Black Butler… I loved historical inspirations and fashion in every media and also the movement. Compared to other artists, I’d say I learned how to make a character live through his gesture instead of his beauty. I wanted to make the kind of medias that inspired me : stories about magic, inspired by historical eras, with lots of cool cloths and adorable characters that are so human and flawed. I am also into sci-fi like Welcome to Gattaca or 1964 so, even if my worlds are fantasy, I tend to depict a lot of class divides or problems of changing oneself to fit in society, the rich and poor…
My stories are meant to make people think about themselves, their place in society and how they can deal with it.
But wait, I did not finish ! As I love talking about Historical fashion and events, I started wanting to talk about powerful minority representative, mostly queers and womens that were lost in the books. I started a series of beautiful prints with gold details to get their lives out. They often inpire my own stories and I love a good watercolor project to break my digital art habit.
While drawing was not so hard as I did that since first day at school, I’ve been working on my storytelling techniques to get my messages across and I feel like I succeeded when I created “ALED ! Je suis Humain !” so I continued.
And I show all of this on plateforms with subscriptions like Patreon or Yurai.co. I also share my journey on Youtube, my channel is Lutin Karau (it’s french, I try to add substitles on most of my videos) where I give business advices, but also give techniques to draw and tell stories better.

Fun fact : Lutin Karau comes from a play of word. I’m portuguese and wanted to play with a name refering to the cod fish, typical portuguese food all of that. And so, it’s bacalhau in portuguese, turning it into romaji for the manga/anime inspiration in my art it turned into bakarau and finally, I added “Le” because of the trend of adding “le”,”la”,”les” in front of english name during the 2018… with time it turned into Lutin Karau (Leprechaun) and I’m happy with this name… it’s funny to be a goblin.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

So actually, I want to pivot NOW ! In 2025.
I have always had this pride of doing everything by myself but I see the limit of this kind of mentality. I want to work with an editor on my next projects so I can learn more about my craft and how to appeal to an audience.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I do art because I need to express something. I need to change the world in order to understand the one I live in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lutinkarau.fr
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lebakarau/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LutinKarau/videos

Image Credits

Smoke Eye Studio https://www.facebook.com/smokeeyesstudio JRH 2024