Lewis Osborne is a Bristol-based illustrator and animator who makes short, looping motion pieces built around a recurring pair of happy and sad face characters.,,His work favors bright colour palettes, gridded compositions and clean black linework, set inside surreal, retro-feeling environments.He has described his own style as “playful and hypnotic”, with the smiling and frowning faces channelling a more anxious undercurrent.
Osborne became interested in design at 15 after finding YouTube tutorials on “making cool backgrounds”, and went on to study graphic design before taking a job in the field. He kept illustrating and animating in his spare time until an Instagram message pointed him toward the platform Hic et Nunc on Tezos in 2021, and he became a full-time freelance illustrator that October. He builds each piece by sketching an idea, drawing vectors in Adobe Illustrator, animating them in After Effects, and finishing with a texture overlay exported at 12 frames per second for a retro feel.In Automation and Mental Recharge, the same smiling and frowning faces point to an unhealthy relationship with modern technology. The cheerfulness itself works as a façade, masking the critique underneath.
He joined the platform SuperRare in 2022.In 2024 he minted TAP TAP, Who's There?, an edition of 310, as his contribution to The Memes, 6529's collectible Meme series. The piece portrays hot, warm and cold crypto wallets as front doors: scammers fail to break into the cold wallet, break into the warm wallet only to find its contents already moved, and break into the hot wallet to find it empty. The image is built around 6529's Three Address Protocol for wallet safety.In June 2026 he collaborated with XCOPY on MISSION CREEP, a video work described on XCOPY's site as “a very British collaboration”.,
