Storyscapes by Emmy
- Emmy Lawless
- Mar 23
- 2 min read
"What art offers is space, a certain breathing room for the spirit." — John Updike
What is Storyscapes by Emmy?
Where Hand-Drawn Animation Meets the Books I Love
Storyscapes by Emmy is an art project born where my two great loves meet: books and the sensory worlds they build around us.
The project creates hand-drawn animated atmospheres and illustrated scenes inspired by the fictional universes of beloved books. Think cozy reading ambience ~ all drawn, layer by (sometimes painstaking ) layer lol. Raindrops, am I right.
The Philosophy
Stubbornly, Beautifully Slow in an Age of Instant Images
In an era where AI-generated images appear in seconds, Storyscapes is doing something deliberately... slow. Layering each illustration with the same care that a writer pours into building a fictional world from scratch.
That slowness is a choice, and it's a meaningful one. The books that inspire these animated scenes weren't written in seconds, they were crafted over years, sometimes entire lifetimes.
The universes inside them were built carefully, obsessively, with so much love for detail.
Art, Books and Rituals
I love art about books.. and books about art. And making art of books in a still life arrangement (and and and)...
On top of the books themselves, I love the rituals that surround them. Rain sounds in the background. Soft music. A pretty reading lamp. That feeling of being transported somewhere else for a while, of sinking into another world entirely. That quiet atmospheric magic.
If you know that feeling, Storyscapes was made for you.
My Why
Carving out a quiet corner of the internet...
BookTok can be a lot. And Reddit? I mean... The internet in general can leave you breathing from your throat rather than your lungs. Shallow, fast, reactive.
I wanted to build something different: an animated reading companion and a cozy corner of the internet that offers - to borrow John Updike's words - "breathing room for the spirit."
A place inspired by books, illustrated with love and fueled by diet dr pepper, and designed to make you feel like you've stepped inside the world of a story you love.
The project:
Storyscapes by Emmy creates illustrated scenes and animated atmospheres drawn from the worlds of fantasy books and beloved stories. You can expect:
Hand-drawn animation - traditional 2D illustration, every element crafted by hand rather than generated.
Fantasy book art and illustrated scenes - castles by the sea, enchanted forests.. and I'm taking requests! You can fill out my request form here.
Ambient reading videos - atmospheric companion content for your reading sessions, built those readers who set a vibe and sink in deep.
Thank you for being here.
All my love,
Emmy
