David Revoy (; born in 1981 in Reims) is a French artist best known as the creator of the free webcomic series Pepper&Carrot which is translated into 27 languages to a degree of 90 percent or more. It is published as books via Glénat.
After work in traditional painting, Revoy started using digital tools in 2003 and moved to use free and open-source software around 2009.
Revoy publishes a great deal of his work under free licenses, allowing his work to be remixed even for commercial use. This has led to derivations of mainly Pepper&Carrot such as animated films, cosplay, a card game and several video games. Revoy has expressed excitement about the derivations and often links to them from his web page. He has interpreted freely licensed works and works in the public domain. In 2010 he was awarded the CG Choice Award for an illustration of Alice in Wonderland. One of his most famous works is "Yin and Yang of world hunger", a remix of the yin and yang symbol.
He has published several tutorials, time-lapse videos, and speed-painting videos showing his work process and has described his hardware and software setup.
Early work
Revoy started as a street portraitist in Avignon at the age of 18. Later he worked in traditional painting, illustration, concept art and teaching. In 2003 he ended his career as a traditional painter and started working with digital tools.
Film work
In 2009–2010, Revoy worked as art director on the Blender short film Sintel, which was the first major project that used free software to produce free culture that Revoy encountered. He would later also work on the Blender films Tears of Steel and Cosmos Laundromat.
Pepper&Carrot
In May 2014, after more than 10 years of freelance work, Revoy published the first episode of the webcomic Pepper&Carrot. Pepper is a young orphan witch disciple at Chaosah, the smallest of the six schools of magic on the magical planet Hereva. She is aided by her cat Carrot, and lives with her mentors Thyme, Cayenne, and Cumin in a house in the forest of Squirrel's End. Her peers are Saffron, Shichimi, Coriander, and Camomile. Revoy aims for each episode to contain a small story arc where a character evolves and learns. The story bible is available on the website.
The webcomic is free (CC-BY) and is financed using crowdfunding. Revoy suggests the business model allows the comic to stay independent and does not have to resort to advertising. Revoy publishes all panels for the comic and often publishes links from his blog to derivations of the comic and characters, such as short animated films, cosplay, a card game and several video games. Revoy has expressed excitement that his work is re-used, saying "I'll never regret making Pepper&Carrot so open." and that he is happy to see other people make money from it. On the webcomic's webpage he extensively explains his philosophy, the reasons for wanting to cut out intermediaries between artist and audience, and why he does not put any content behind a paywall. He attributes some of the success of the webcomic to the release of its source, and highlighted the translations into some 50 languages. Reviews of the text in the comic and the translations are performed in GitLab using Markdown.
When the publisher Glénat reached out to Revoy about publishing Pepper&Carrot, he declined their offer of a traditional contract with royalty payments in favor of keeping the Creative Commons attribution license, something that caused confusion in the legal and financial departments of the publisher. Glénat then offered to be the top patron of the webcomic, and Revoy retained the copyright and creative control over it. He considers Glénat's published books as just one of many other derivative works of the webcomic.
About working on the webcomic, Revoy said in 2015 that it was a dream come true and that "Every artist I know would love to make their own comics. Would love to get paid for making it, and to keep the control of it".
Free software
Revoy uses free and open-source software (FOSS). However, even since having paid more than €3000 on software licenses for proprietary software, he rejects the notion that it is primarily a question about money. Though practicality, low cost and possibility to work on lower end hardware were initial motivators for Revoy to move from proprietary software to free software, in 2020 he said that there were even better reasons. He then rather referred to the benefits of control, performance and standards, transparency, and control over data and privacy. Among the cons he listed that he depends on hardware being compatible with Linux, which may be more difficult to find and not well documented.