Are You the Easter Bunny?
Written by Janeen Brian and published by HarperCollins, January 2026
An adorable picture book celebrating the endangered Easter bilby.
Deep in the hot Australian desert lives a cute little creature with long soft ears and a whiskery nose. Could it be the Easter Bunny?
“From award-winning duo Janeen Brian and Lucinda Gifford comes this celebration of the bilby, one of Australia's most important and endangered creatures.”
Out now!
“Are you the Easter Bunny? will be a wonderful addition to a home, school or public library. If you purchase one Easter picture book this year, I highly recommend this one. It is just delightful.”
“I always love presenting books where the ‘learning’ isn’t whacking kids over the head heavily but rather leading them gently and inviting them to find out more, to wonder and to reflect. This is one such book that will be invaluable in both classrooms/libraries and home. A definite triumph.”
“Through Brian’s clever text that explains how the bilby is such an asset to the environment and Gifford’s engaging illustrations that put the creature right into the child’s realm, just as teaming them with this particular time of the year did so all those years ago, young readers will start to appreciate the critical role it plays in making the arid desert somewhere for both creatures and plants to survive.”
“Are You The Easter Bunny? is a warming treat to snuggle down with and serve up to littlies aged three and above this Easter holiday season because, like Bilby’s intricate burrow, it is full of stimulating twists and turns generating as much appeal as the real EB himself.”
This was a gorgeous book to illustrate! Here are some development drawings - from my sketchbook. In these, I’m working out what technique to use (watercolour, pencil, or a mixture) and what colours work best. I’m also researching the birds and flowers and grasses that live in and around the Great Sandy Desert in Australia. This is one of the areas the bilby (which is endangered) can still be found.
Bilbies are tricky to draw! Here are some of my sketches. If you look, you can see how I’m trying to work out the bilby shape. My first bilby drawings looked more like rats.
This is a page from my storyboard. In the storyboard, I usually try to work out the flow of the text and images, who and what to show, and whether to show the characters close up or far away.
This is a rough illustration of the same page. I start to do the rough illustrations once the storyboard has been approved by the publisher and the author. For the roughs, I usually try to lock in positioning and linework, and to work out the colours. Once everyone is happy with the roughs, I start the final art.
This book is a little different, though. Before doing the final illustrations, I decided to use a ‘cut out’ effect on the pages with the bilby and the birds. This makes the layout a little ‘flatter’, but I liked the look and so did the publisher. We thought it might encourage children to make stick puppets of the characters!
There are some activity sheets and cutout guides on my activity page here.
Sometimes it can be hard to get things right, especially with watercolour paint and smudgy pencil. Here are just SOME of the ears I drew. My studio walls were plastered with rejected bilby ears. I like the black and white ones best, but the book is not black and white, so I couldn’t use them. Of the colour ears, I prefer the ones on the right/bottom – and those are the ears in the book. I had to cheat a bit and improve them digitally in PhotoShop though.
I researched the plants in the book quite carefully and even contacted my friends at the Melbourne Botanic Gardens for advice. Sadly, there aren’t many suitable desert plants growing in Victoria, where I live. So I logged onto a national plant database and put together a spreadsheet of suitable plants. Then I gathered all the images I could find online (travel blogs are great for this!) and leafed through botanical library books (libraries are great!), because it can be hard to know how things really look if you don’t have them in front of you.
Once I’d chosen the plants, I simplified them for my art, making the shapes of the leaves and petals clearer and more distinct for the young audience. I wanted the book to look colourful and pretty. So I painted splashes onto paper, and made marks on bright bits of card. Then I cut up these lovely bright things and (digitally and in real life) and made collages of the plants to add to the artwork for the book.
Finally, Just before Christmas 2025, I came down with a miserable virus for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t do much work but, between coughing fits, I made three finger puppets to go with Are You The Easter Bunny?
They are baby native birds: Pink Cockatoo (Galah), Spinifex Pigeon and Zebra Finch.
They’re a bit bobbly - but I like them.