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Drawing Horrible People

Liza Donnelly
3 min readDec 14, 2021

The finale of the series “Succession” was challenging to live draw

Some of the cast of Succession. Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin

I’ve live-drawn many things over the past six years since I discovered this digital form of journalism. The other night, I decided to live draw a scripted television show, which I did only once before during the Mad Men show finale. The series I drew the other night was the season finale of Succession, a dark — and somewhat comedic — fictional series about a media mogul and his adult children. It’s beautifully acted and written, and is very wordy. It is hard to draw for the wordy reason as well as the speed with which the camera moves around; not always conducive to a coherent visual piece. Plus, as the episode progresses, I have no idea what will happen and what moments will be key points in the narrative. I don’t feel I did it justice, but I drew what I could and tweeted it out in real time. Many of my twitter followers seemed to enjoy what I was doing, even if they don’t follow the series. May have sold some prints, and I even got followed by one of the actors (whom I didn’t draw during that show, as good as she was).

Actor Kieran Culkin

My live-drawing is partly about connecting and sharing things that we all (or many of us) are experiencing. As a cartoonist…

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