Sophia que sorria (Sophia Who Smiled) is the first entirely original project I've done, from the text to the illustrations.
Transforming other writers' texts into illustrations has always given me a magical feeling, but writing and illustrating my own book has been incredible!
Sophia Who Smiled is a book inspired by how children can, with simple solutions, show us that smiling is easier than complaining all day. It seems that when we become adults, we only focus on what can go wrong and irritate us; it seems we lose the lightness of understanding that everything was just a stumble and that a simple remedy would heal that small scrape on the knee.
Since 2024 I had been thinking about creating my own stories, and the following year, I decided once and for all that this would be a path to follow.
In 2025 I took on another aspect of my work: I started teaching drawing to children aged 5 to 10 every day, in two schools in my region. This interaction with children allowed me to understand childhood, to see how children react in their daily lives. I turned the school into my own laboratory, understanding smiles, cries, stories, mannerisms, and at the same time, absorbing all of that.
And from that, I begin to write this story. It stems from the desire to have smiled more when I was little, along with the understanding that my students saved me on many days when all I could do was complain.
Thank you, children.
You save me every day.
Here are some thumbnails of the sketches of some pages!
Thanks for watching!
