Sue Todd’s Six-Page Marie Antoinette Graphic Novel Brings Linocut Thinking to Digital Ink

For Sue Todd, moving from carved linoleum to digital ink keeps image-making rooted in the same kind of problem solving. Her new work is a six-page graphic novel about Marie Antoinette, made in what the source describes as a versatile new style. The project puts that change of method in focus: Todd is exploring how a familiar, hands-on approach to shape and image can inform a digitally made narrative.

The feature shares two views of the work: a cover and a page identified as page three. Those images offer a glimpse of the project’s format, while the available description leaves its palette, lettering, panel structure and production details unspecified. That makes the shift in medium the clearest point of entry. Digital ink gives Todd a new way to make the work, while her wider practice connects digital coloring with the mark-making traditions of print.

From carved marks to digital color

Todd describes herself as working in both analog and digital worlds. Her established technique begins with linocut: she carves an image, then adds color digitally. That sequence brings the physical decisions of carving into a workflow that also allows her to work with digital color. The new graphic novel extends that interest in tools and process through digital ink, although the feature doesn’t specify the software, equipment or exact steps she used.

For illustrators, the useful idea here is the continuity between methods. A change in tool doesn’t need to erase the habits developed with another material. Carving asks an artist to think about marks and shapes as they’re made; digital work brings a different set of ways to build and adjust an image. Todd’s practice draws on both, with problem solving through imagery at its center. The feature presents the graphic novel as a new direction in that ongoing exploration, without claiming that digital ink reproduces the look or limits of a carved block.

The six-page length also gives the project a defined narrative scale. A short graphic novel has to carry its subject through a limited sequence of images. The source doesn’t describe Todd’s writing, pacing or page design, so those choices can’t be attributed to her here. What it does establish is that she is working in a narrative form and developing a new visual approach for it. That combination makes the piece relevant to illustrators considering how a change in medium might support work that unfolds across several pages.

A practice shaped by print history

Todd’s stated influences include medieval woodcuts, the art of Jim Flora, and the woodcuts of Frans Masereel and Jose Francisco Borges. These references place her practice in conversation with image-making traditions built around distinctive shapes and printed marks. They also help explain why linocut is a meaningful part of her approach: it’s a way of working that gives the artist direct contact with the image’s construction.

That background gives the digital work a wider context without reducing it to a simple comparison between old and new tools. Todd’s process already combines carved imagery with digital coloring. For designers and illustrators, that combination suggests a practical way to think about a mixed workflow: choose each medium for the decisions it supports, and let the subject and format guide how they work together. The feature doesn’t outline a recipe for making the graphic novel, but Todd’s established practice makes experimentation across materials an explicit part of her work.

Illustration across formats

Based in Toronto, Todd has made work for books, magazines, posters, T-shirts, a television commercial and a bus. Her credited clients include Barnes and Noble, Crown Publishing, Pearson Education, Klutz Press, Andrews McMeel Accord, The Wall Street Journal, the American Bar Association, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Walmart Canada. The range shows her work appearing across editorial, publishing and other commissioned formats; the feature doesn’t attach specific pieces to individual clients.

Todd is also exploring children’s publishing through stories she is writing and illustrating, which are described as works in progress. Alongside illustration, she paints oil portraits in both analog and digital forms. These activities point to an artist moving among different subjects, formats and materials, with image-making as the connecting thread.

She is an associate of the Ontario College of Art, now OCADU. The feature offers no date for when the Marie Antoinette graphic novel will be completed or published, so its six-page scope and current presentation are the available project details. For readers following Todd’s work, the most concrete takeaway is the process question it raises: what can a digital method bring to a narrative when the artist already thinks through the tactile logic of print?

See the Sue Todd portfolio and her website.