Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lilli Eller. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lilli, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Many of my art projects study the theme of the relationship between the natural world and humanity. I am a person who thrives in the embrace of the woods, and shrinks away from bustling cityscapes. I took my senior thesis project as an opportunity to reflect my awe for nature and horror about destructive humankind. I worked on a series of five paintings depicting how humans try to control nature and wishes for a time when the paths of humanity and nature wind tightly together once more. The imagery was pulled from mythological creatures that had occupied much of my childhood fascination. Haunting dryads, malicious kelpie horses, and kudzu vine creatures crawled across my painted landscapes. The medium of the thesis project was also incredibly meaningful to me, as it gave me the freedom to experiment with acrylic paint. I was able to employ subtle and transparent washes to instill luminosity, allowing my mythical subjects to come alive.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an illustrator from San Francisco with a particular focus on character design and editorial illustration. I’m currently studying Illustration at Parsons School of Design at The New School. I first began pursuing art after becoming entranced by illustration’s potential for conveying stories.
Throughout my life I’ve paid special attention to all the ways that illustration is incorporated in our world. Editorial illustration was most apparent in any article I read, and I marveled at its capacity for abstracting an article’s message into symbolism. Character and background design attracted me because of its capacity to make stories spring to life through detail. The synthesis of imaginative writing and illustrated scenes in comics was beautiful to me, and something I always strive to incorporate in my own work. For each of these mediums, I balance the distinct visual language of my painterly art style with vastly different approaches to enhance my versatility. No matter the medium, my artwork often studies the natural imagery of trees, birds, and water, with humans taking in the landscape around them.
I also really enjoy commission work. The process is incredibly satisfying; from taking the time to understand what is expected of me when given a prompt to the artmaking process in which I take full responsibility of keeping the commissioner updated throughout the process. I make sure that the sketches I show the client are thoroughly organized, and always ensure that their feedback is implemented carefully so that the final illustration aligns completely with their expectations. I am very proud of my ingenuity, as I focus on delivering an illustration with highly developed ideas that address the prompt completely while expanding on it creatively. I am a highly dedicated worker, taking every task given to me with the utmost focus.
I’m constantly striving to improve my work. I see an endless road ahead of me where my art style will change vastly throughout the way. Rather than this being daunting, I see this process as an opportunity to have fun along the way. I highlight experimentation in my work, constantly shifting my focus to new mediums (both digitally and through painting) while still staying grounded in my themes.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My childhood was immersed in all kinds of fiction, and I marveled at how real these stories felt to me. I deeply cared about each character; galvanized by their motivations and feeling devastated when they were hurt. The resonant emotionality I felt from these stories was a really beautiful accomplishment to me, and was a marker of the beauty of human empathy. Comics, animations, and video games took this to an entirely new level for me. I became fixated on how each character’s design provided subliminal information for their personalities and roles in the world. I studied how backgrounds subtly changed the entire feeling of the fictional world (like the slight skewing of the buildings in Spider-Verse that gives the entire world a chaotic and dynamic feeling). I was fascinated by how illustration’s rigorous visual detail expanded on the already intensely compelling stories and made them come to life. Ever since my childhood, I’ve dreamt of instilling this awe in others.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

It’s incredibly fulfilling to see my art have an impact on another person. After going to a particularly thought-provoking exhibition in a museum, I’m always left with a deep awe. That feeling of walking away from art with a new perspective on the world (no matter how slight) is an incredibly beautiful phenomenon to me. I see it as a wordless conversation, where the artist imbues their work with a discussion on an aspect of the world that they’ve noticed in the hopes that someone will understand their view. The reason I devote my life to art is to engage in this discussion. Art allows me to notice the world around me instead of letting it pass by, and it instills an incredible meaning in my life.
Although I’m a fairly new artist, I’ve felt this fulfillment a few times. In showing my thesis work, I was told by a classmate that they really resonated with my work. They described how they had been thinking of the relationship between humanity and nature a lot recently, and that it was incredibly fulfilling to see their thinking relayed in artwork. This validation that people can engage with my art, and recognize the deeper meaning, makes my art (and my life) feel deeply significant.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lillieller.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/halliaetus?igsh=MWthZGMya28zMXk1aA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/lilli-eller-7748352bb