Monthly Comic Strip Graphic Artist

Hi! I'm Sarah, the co-founder of BE.IRL — a nonprofit program that helps kids ages 5–10 choose real life over screens. I'm looking for a children's illustrator to help bring our comic strip to life for a summer snail mail program. Every week kids get a letter in the mail, and inside is a 15-panel comic strip starring our two mascot characters — Izzy and Ivan, a pair of bumblebee twins. Here's what the project looks like: The characters are already designed. Izzy is a round, fluffy bumblebee with a white daisy on her head. Ivan is the same but with a blue baseball cap. Both wear pajamas in most of the panels since the stories happen at bedtime. We have Midjourney reference images for both characters and all the room environments (living room, Ivan's bedroom, Izzy's bedroom) that I'll share with whoever we hire. The art style is warm children's picture book illustration — soft, rounded, expressive faces, gentle cel shading. Think cozy storybook, not comic-book. Not Bluey. Our audience is kids 5–7 so it needs to feel safe and warm, not edgy or graphic. The scope is 10 comic strips, 15 panels each — 150 panels total. Each panel is landscape ratio (roughly 3:2). I'll provide a full panel-by-panel script with character positions, expressions, and setting descriptions for every single panel. You'd deliver clean print-ready PNG files. The most important thing for this job is character consistency. Izzy and Ivan need to look like themselves across all 150 panels. That's the skill I'm most focused on when I'm looking at portfolios. Before committing to the full project I'd want to do a small paid test — probably 2 or 3 panels from Letter 1 — just to make sure the style is a good match. If this sounds like your kind of project, please send me your portfolio (children's illustration only), 2–3 examples that are closest to the warm storybook style I described, your per-panel rate, and a rough timeline estimate for the full 150 panels. Thanks so much! Sarah BE.IRL