Meet Lilli Eller

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lilli Eller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lilli below.

Hi Lilli, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience is something I really struggle with. I have such a strong passion to create art that it almost feels like an intrinsic need, but there are a lot of failures and rejections along the way that often feel insurmountable. I particularly struggle with resilience in my pursuit of a career in concept art. I love character designing, and it’s my ultimate goal to get a job where I am hired for my artstyle to help shape the personalities and physical attributes of characters in video games or animations. However, it’s an incredibly competitive field and there are so many masters of character design that it often feels as though I’ll never get to their level. It’s very paralyzing sometimes.

What usually helps me get out of this feeling of powerlessness is focusing on my goal. I’ll remind myself how much I want to move people with the startling emotionality in the stories I illustrate. I’ll remember all the media that has brought me to tears from the depth of their narratives, and I remind myself of how wonderful it would feel to be on the art team of a project like that. When I imagine the joy I’d feel in that role, it always seems to dim any panic I feel about not being good enough and instead propels me into the action of improving my art so that I can get to that level.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m an illustrator who paints with digital and acrylic mediums to capture vibrant emotionality in storytelling. Throughout my life I’ve marveled at the fact that humans can create media that move audiences to tears and cause them to empathize deeply with characters. I feel an intrinsic need to participate in this process, to be part of the wonderful artistic force in the entertainment and publishing industries. Currently I’m focusing on this goal through illustrating magazine articles, creating character design commissions, and designing album covers. I especially love the process of editorial illustration, as it’s an incredibly fulfilling process to translate my resonance with each article into visual symbolism.

No matter the medium, I am often drawn to themes of the relationship between nature and humanity. The discordance between my love for nature and my place in a species that might bring about its downfall is something I constantly reckon with. My depictions of the mentality of human superiority over nature and the fictionalization of the wild are concepts that give me catharsis in illustrating. Similarly to the concept of anthropomorphism, I am captivated by how humans draw alienation. Most depictions of aliens give them near-identical human structures, like bipedalism and human facial features. To me, this phenomenon speaks to the human struggle to conceptualize anything separate from their own experiences. Because of this, I’m trying to pursue true alienation in my artwork and strive for inhuman depictions of aliens.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I consider the skills of dedication to every project, organization, and love for exploration to be the most impactful in furthering my art career.

Whenever I practice art, I try to make every session a dedicated learning experience for how I can improve. I make master studies of my favorite artists’ pieces, I intently follow anatomy and shading tutorials, and I bother my friends constantly to give me critique every time I make an illustration. This dedication also applies to professional projects that I’m assigned, as I put my all into fulfilling the vision of the client no matter how many projects I have to balance. My success has been ensured through this dedicated push of my progress towards expertise in every personal and professional art project I work on.

Organization is another incredibly important skill. My thoroughly maintained files, detailed sketches, and meticulous attention to the timeline of every project are all things that made my work stand out both to my teachers and the people I work with professionally. The importance of organization throughout the entire process really can’t be understated, although it’s often disregarded in favor of only prioritizing the final product.

The prioritization of dedication and organization are also essential because mastering them has allowed me to focus on the curious exploration of topics I find interesting. Research about nature, science fiction, or any of the other topics I gravitate towards keep me constantly inspired in my art. The ease of which creative ideas come to me can be attributed to my curiosity in the pursuit of topics I find interesting.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

Pursuing a career as an illustrator is incredibly difficult to sustain, both in the pursuit of a steady design job and in the freelance department. Every full time or part time job posted seems to require 5 years of experience in the field already, so there are very few opportunities for developing artists to enter into the field. Also, each job posting website is completely oversaturated, with each job getting 200 applicants within two days of it being posted, so there is a near impossible chance that hirers will even see your application. As for freelance, it takes several years to begin getting multiple opportunities per month, making it an often unreliable medium for making a living.

The way I surmount this challenge (or attempt to) is to remember the phrase “when you’re in, you’re in.” It’s something many teachers and professional artists have told me to remember; that it may take awhile to cement yourself in the art field but once you gain a footing your clients will start to recommend you to others and your career will grow exponentially. It’s a promise that seems far-fetched to me now, but one that I hope will prove true. For now, all I can do is try everything I can to gain that initial footing through exhausting every job posting, personal connection, and leads from cold emailing. I know that the road ahead will be long, but it gives me hope to focus on the potential of the future.

Contact Info:

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