De Villiers began making art and comics in the final decades of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. She contributed to Bitterkomix, a cutting-edge Afrikaans magazine, with its facetious satire, definitive line-work, and subversive messages and created her own graphic novel entitled Ma Mère était une très belle femme (My Mother was a beautiful woman). Throughout her career, her art has retained an element of the dark, comical and narrative. She works in a mode of portrait illustration across various mediums, including acrylic and oil painting, ink, watercolor, sculpture, and printmaking. Each medium imparts its own distinctive features but the cast of naively-rendered figures remains constant, exerting their tragicomic pathos and a prevailing sense of doom.