What if your finger turned into a slug? In Lily Shaul’s surreal animated world, nothing needs to make sense

Like most people, if not all, the illustrator and animator Lily Shaul doesn’t like slugs. That didn’t, however, hinder the artist’s curiosity about a world where they’re a completely unavoidable species – not just the squishy creatures we cautiously avoid squashing in the rain – but something that’s a bit more permanent, like, for example, a bodypart. This was the idea behind her animated short The Slug Finger: a surreal hand-drawn sequence with an unnerving twist (the protagonist’s finger does in fact turn into a slug). The short creates quite the run of funny scenarios that would logically arise from having a slug as a finger – turns out it’s quite a useful set up for sealing letters but not the most attractive accessory when you’re out on a date.

Like The Slug Finger, many of Lily’s animations have quite “mundane beginnings” she tells us, but they slowly become “funny, strange, magical journeys, warping normality into something unexpected”, she says, like Teeth Time, another of the artist’s shorts that turns the boring act of brushing your teeth on its head by reimagining the plug hole as a portal to another universe. Drawing these stories frame by frame, Lily loves to build up entire worlds of imaginative, unearthly characters as they push her to animate in unusual ways: “I love creating fluid, wobbly, exaggerated movement,” she says. “I animate digitally but I’m always making things with my hands and using real materials. I love the texture and immediacy of colour pencils and gouache, the vibrant flat colour of screen printing and using embroidery to transform my work into 3D.”

Since Lily’s otherworldly illustrations and animations are often anchored in the mundane, she spends a lot of her time observing everything, even small day-to-day details, in order to image them anew. A large part of her practice is location drawing, her sketchbooks full of “ordinary scenes” that Lily later transforms into “otherworldly realities”, she says. Colour plays a particularly important role in all of these observations, just like in the illustrator’s recent colour pencil series Tiny Tokyo from her trip to Japan. “Colour is everything to me. It’s how I see the world, my personality, how I dress, it’s an integral part of me and brings me so much joy,” the illustrator ends. “In all my work colour and humour play an important role, I want to make people smile, laugh and feel joyful.”