First in a series introducing the Crop bench. Lizzie Lomax, illustrator - on paper, texture, and work that could only have come from a person.

Not a supplier list. People whose work we know, whose judgement we trust, and who we would put in front of a client without a rehearsal. We will introduce them one at a time, starting with Lizzie Lomax.

There is a moment on most brand projects where the photography runs out. You need to show an idea rather than a thing, and the stock library’s version of it belongs to everyone else as much as it belongs to you. That is the gap illustration fills.

Lizzie works from a shared studio at Phoenix Arts Centre in Brighton.

Lizzie makes the sort of illustration that reminds you why illustration exists. Drawing, collage, texture, bold colour and a healthy dose of imperfection come together to make work with an actual point of view. It’s playful without being childish, clever without trying too hard, and unmistakably made by a person.

Look closer, though, and the looseness is doing careful work. Flat colour, shapes built without outlines, a tight palette held in each scene, hand-lettering where a caption is needed. Her birds are identifiable by species - the magpie, the wren, the nuthatch, the waxwing - inside a style that still feels handmade. Warm without being vague is a difficult thing to be, and it is why the Natural History Museum and Turner Contemporary have both come back to her more than once.

Left, the Hay Festival 2025 programme cover in line drawing on yellow. Right, an illustrated allotment - a robin on a wheelbarrow, tomato beds, a wood pigeon and a child picking strawberries
Left: the 2025 Hay Festival programme, where Lizzie was Illustrator in Residence. Right: from Habitat Heroes, for the RHS and the Natural History Museum.

She has drawn for the Natural History Museum, the RHS, the Woodland Trust, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the FT and the Big Issue, and was Illustrator in Residence at Hay Festival. Her first book, Rewild This Book, is out now with Nosy Crow and the National Trust. She is also co-founder and co-editor of Seed Magazeen, a magazine for kids who care about the environment.

The range is the interesting part.

A 'Birdsong setlist' spread naming the calls of a pigeon, magpie, wren and woodpecker, beside a child fingerprinting ladybirds onto an activity page
From Rewild This Book, published with Nosy Crow and the National Trust. Made to be drawn in.

The same hand that draws a museum activity sheet for a seven-year-old also draws a Stephen Bush column for the FT. Very few people can do both.

That matters more than it used to. Anyone can generate an image now. Almost nobody can generate one that looks like it came from a specific person with a specific way of seeing things, because that is the one thing the tools are worst at.

You can see her work at lizzielomax.co.uk and the rest of the bench on our network page.