How Lily Kong’s series Sweet Escape reignited her intuitive approach to illustration

At the mid-point of 2024, illustrator and graphic designer Lily Kong made a conscious decision to slow down – to rekindle parts of her practice that were more intuitive and iterative. She began to revisit drawing as a tool to mark personal memories and interpret her innermost feelings, and from this came her series Sweet Escape. Unlike client projects, where you travel from point A to point B and “make sure everything is made efficiently”, Lily says, the project is a body of fragmented works that the illustrator slowly developed by drawing inspiration from landscapes she had seen, and dreamt of.

Whilst much of Lily’s past work lent on storytelling, “exploring emotion and drama through characters, movement and setting”, she shares, this series felt different. It was a way to focus on something that felt lighter and it “simply made room for joy”. Having lived amongst “concrete, traffic, screens and sleepless nights” in London for far too long, says Lily, documenting peaceful, colour-drenched scenes was a way to “feel” nature again, and “sense an unspoken bond between myself and the world around me.

From sketches and collages, to block printing and watercolour studies, Lily created this set of observational landscapes by deliberately unplugging from her digital life and getting outside. “Our phones never rest”, says the illustrator. “None of these things seem urgent, yet all of them are. Sometimes all of it makes me wonder what we live for. But in the mountains, our hearts can soften. I look at the trees, the sky, the clouds and the blue water; then I know I live for this beautiful world.”

Much of the making process was trial and error for Lily – most creative decisions were made without much planning. Drawings weren’t finalised all at once and compositions emerged when she revisited pieces. This pace meant “things were able to happen in the gaps”, Lily tells us – there was more to notice about what materials lent themselves to expressing certain colours, gradients or shapes. Even things like the movement of shadows became magnified in her reduced, graphic play on “the tension between flatness and textures”.

After developing a series of prints with Drool from this collection of work, (many of which are now available to buy), Lily wanted to create a more structured environment to house her landscapes, so she decided to make an artist book on her residency at London Centre for Book Arts. “The book aims to be a doorway to escape from reality,” Lily shares, its Riso-printed pages are a stunning sequence of the landscapes Lily has loved, drawn and photographed, from sunsets by the sea to a bright day in the mountains. “Everything from the embossed book title, size of the book to binding method are carefully curated,” she says. “Since all of the landscapes were referenced from memories, I thought the grains and the layering inks of Risograph prints were perfect to mimic the narratives of memories.”

The artist book and print series have found new audiences for Lily’s work and brought a number of new visitors to her illustrated world. This growing support for such a personal project “really shifted something in me”, she ends. “It helped me see potential in even my most deeply personal pieces. It gave me space and confidence to spotlight the parts of myself I used to keep quiet.”