Hello there!

I’m Lillias, a Scottish children’s picture-book illustrator, writer, and creative explorer (currently living a year in France!). My passion for storytelling began among red clay dust, paints, and stacks of books, and has taken me on a creative path which encompasses 15 years of international music performance, a first class degree in Visual Communication from the London School of Arts (2011), and work in theatre, exhibition design, and alternative education.

A little about my creative process - I work mainly with acrylic gouache, pencil, crayon and pastel on paper. Living with aphantasia, (an absence of mental imagery), I don’t ‘imagine’ visually, instead I use words, concepts, intuition, spatial reasoning and hands-on experimentation. I document the everyday and the unexpected through observational sketches and journaling, and always enjoy experiment directly on the page. As a result, my studio is in a constant state of beautiful mess!

After the birth of my second child, and navigating the challenge of being an artist and mother, I took a course with The Good Ship Illustration, which sparked my first picture book Too Snappy to Wear a Nappy. Selected for the dPictus Unpublished Picturebook Showcase in Bologna 2023, it was swiftly ‘snapped up’ for publication. My second title, If a Monkey Ate Nothing but Bananas was published in June 2025.

My stories explore the every day, through unusual perspectives: a giraffe who refuses nappies, a monkey who eats everything but bananas, a tadpole that (almost) never grows up, or a child who believes a storm has broken the stars and stolen the moon (but knows how to fix it, of course!).

Running parallel to my work as an illustrator I am also the co-founder of The Nest and The Den - two self-directed, nature-led forest schools in Glasgow.

I love what I do and believe in the power of children’s books to shape our culture, our communities, and the people we grow into. If you would like to work with me, please get in touch! I can often be found in my home studio, wild swimming, cycle-touring, or exploring the rhythms of a new life in Avignon. I can also be found every year working as part of the dPictus team on the Unpublished Picturebook Showcase at Bologna Book Fair… and of course no matter where you are in the world we can connect right now, right here. I look forward to meeting you mail@lillias.co.uk