Land of Mirrors named Top 25 Illustrations of 2025 by Its Nice That!

"Bathed in saturated colours, the book is a welcome respite from reality, as we sink into the illustrator’s enchanting gradients and soft hues, following her incredible line work into a new fantasy world. Considering her expert use of colour, it’s hard to imagine that when the artist first started making fanzines and illustrations following her fine art studies, she was actually quite afraid of it. In fact she practically worked in black-and-white, gradually “adding one colour in at a time”, she says. “Now my way of working with colours has much to do with memory, as they aren’t realistic colours. When I colour a scene I try to remember a certain landscape or place where I’ve been that has the same atmosphere that I want that scene to have.”
In a similar feat to María’s previous book Echos, published by Fidèle Editions, Land of Mirrors is a testament to the illustrator’s detailed attention to the creation of atmosphere through colour. In terms of its narrative however, María aimed to do quite the opposite of another past project of hers, Cenit, published by Apa-Apa: “In Cenit, I tried to create a story that was somehow uncomfortable and with a lot of estrangement. Land of Mirrors has estrangement, but I wanted to approach it in a completely different way, to try to think of different possibilities for ways of living,” she explains. Overall, the fantasy world of the comic facilitates “a heartfelt meditation on loneliness, friendship, and the transformative power of love”."