Spotlight on Artist Katie Hardy, 2024 Local Holiday Gift Guide Illustrator

What would the holidays be without bright lights, fun Christmas cards from friends and family, yummy home-baked treats and delicious hot drinks?

All of these things embody the warm, fuzzy feeling of the holiday season. And this year, we're thrilled to have had Katie Hardy, a St. John's-based graphic designer and multidisciplinary artist, capture the sentiment through her bright and lively illustrations, which you'll see sprinkled throughout our 2024 Local Holiday Gift Guide.

In addition to our gift guide, you might've seen Katie's work with local headwear and apparel brand VOLTFUSE, or on various albums, event posters and other local products. While digital art is her main focus, she also enjoys collage, clothing and textile design, and screen printing. 

For those who aren't familiar with her work, we recently caught up with Katie to talk about her fun and colourful aesthetic, from where she draws her inspiration, and other artists who've inspired her along the way. 

Katie Hardy

Business & Arts NL: For those who might not be familiar with you, can you tell them a bit about yourself and your work as an artist?

Katie Hardy:  I'd describe myself as a graphic designer/multidisciplinary artist. I've been working in graphic design for the past few years - freelancing, I've done some work in film, and I've done random graphic design contracts here and there. I started drawing when I was in high school, so I carried that throughout my career and developed my illustration style. I was posting on Instagram for a while, and that was how I shared all of my creations and my work.

Business & Arts NL: How would you describe your artistic style?

KH: Kind of cartoony, digital, illustration. There's a lot of queer themes. I draw my cats a lot. A lot of it is scenes from my own life and from my home. Just fun, colourful, cartoony, digital vibes.

Katie at work in her studio.

Business & Arts NL: What other artists inspire you, and what inspires or informs your own artistic practice?

KH: There's a lot of artists that I follow on Instagram that I do love. I love Polly Nor; she's a digital artist and she's done some really interesting stuff with these kind of demon characters. There's another artist, Brian "Box" Brown, and he does some interesting stuff with advocating for more education around cannabis. I really like both of their styles. I think that it's a little bit similar to what I like to create in terms of super colourful, bright and cartoony kind of vibes. So I definitely love looking at their work and gathering inspiration from them.

Business & Arts NL: Looking at your illustrations for the gift guide this year, it brings to mind vintage Christmas cards. From where did you draw your inspiration for those illustrations?

KH: I'm so glad that it gives vintage Christmas card vibes (laughs). I'm very into tinsel and having a lot of fun, handmade/homemade items. And I feel like that's a lot of what the gift guide is about, like, how can I give really unique, handmade items to people. So I was trying to capture all of that in one image with the candle and the vibes and the mug and everything. I felt like that was reflective of all the individual fun little things that you have around during Christmas and the holidays; so just trying to gather inspiration from my own experience of Christmas.

Business & Arts NL: Can you tell us a little bit about what your creative process was like for creating these illustrations?

KH: I created two different sketches...with colour palette options and some inspiration pictures on the side. If I'm really inspired by the colour palette in the photo, or if I really like how it's formatted, I will pull things like that to show that's what I want to emulate. So I had a couple different options with some inspiration, colour palettes, and then went forward with going in and refining the sketch in Illustrator and vectorizing everything, getting all the colours how I wanted them, working on the typography. Choosing a font, that's usually one of my last steps. And that's pretty much it - just trying to bring it all together and figure out if it's exactly what everyone's looking for.

Business & Arts NL: Do you have any upcoming projects or works in progress that you can tell us about?

KH: I have a calendar that I do every year...it's the Lady Katie 2025 calendar. It's basically a calendar full of my illustrations from the past year, and I try to format them in a fun way…they're 40 bucks, they're up on my website, and shipping within Canada.

To see more of Katie's work, visit her website at katiehardy.com, or follow her on Instagram @_ladykatie.