“I like to draw pretty things”: Lia Sued C. on trading too much screen-time for tactile illustrations

Lia Sued C. calls her drawings “over-the-top, colourful and sometimes so crazy” that she finds it hard to tell what’s even in the drawing – but she likes it this way. She creates images where the viewer discovers new little things the more they look at it. It’s all hidden inside of the magic, a quality that’s brought out across markers, colour pencils, gellyroll pens, glitter and stickers, effectively bombing the page with non-stop texture, no matter how saturated and chaotic.

“I can’t think of a better way to explain it than to just say I like to draw pretty things,” says Lia. “A pretty ice cream cone full of sprinkles and gummy bears. A pretty bug, a beautiful bar of soap. Literally any flower or combination of flowers. If it’s beautiful and colorful, odds are I will want to draw it.” Collaging all of her favourite things in often one page, Lia lets her inspirations (which include a passion for karaoke, so much so that Lia has made a YouTube channel that creates videos and visualisers for obscure songs that don’t have karaoke versions available, just in case you wanted to kill a party by singing ML Buch!), fly in commissions with Crack Magazine or the New York Times, where she illustrates “recipes by musicians” and food, so much so that Lia says that she “likes drawing food more than eating it.”

Last time we covered Lia, her illustration style existed almost exclusively digitally, but since then she bored of it and started engaging with the Still Here, Still Life online challenge. Through it, she practiced drawing realistically, which confirmed that she needed a break from the blue light of the computer screen, however she still utilises the practice for initial sketching. “If it’s something that needs to be done yesterday I will always go digital, and even insist upon it if the client wants it traditionally done in digital time. Last time I was featured I would say yes to any and every commission that came my way, even if they overlapped, which obviously took a toll on me eventually,” says Lia.

Nevertheless, the same inspirations persist, but now they’ve only gotten stronger. Driven by an appreciation for music, Mickey Mouse, Bráulio Amado and Mark Chagall, whose painting Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel has hung in her home her whole life, Lia is driven by art that reminds her of “the loveliest dreams.” As well as that, David Hockney is an inspiration, not just in aesthetic but also in his fluidity between physical and digital painting, which taught Lia to give up on “fake rules” she’d made for herself. Now, much further into her career, Lia plays by her own rules, creating visual worlds that look lawless, hyperactive, filled with noise – but the closer you look, the more dreamlike it appears, reaching towards that exquisite distance she finds so admirable in Chagall’s work.