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.