Letterer and illustrator, Heather Hardison, clearly doesn’t shy from making a statement – the bolder, the better! Since graduating from the College of Design at North Carolina State University in 2009, with a degree in Art & Design, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue her creative career. And boy did her career blossom.
“My work is a hybrid of digital and analog,” she told The Design Kids. “Almost everything that I do starts as a pencil sketch. From there, the final output depends on the purpose. For hand painted signs, the entire process is analog. For designs that utilize hand painted letters, but have final output that is print or digital, I scan in the lettering to manipulate in Photoshop. Other times, when something needs to be scaleable, my sketch is vectorized in Illustrator.”
Specializing in food illustration and sign painting, she is the author and illustrator of the book Homegrown: Illustrated Bites from your Garden to your Table – a fully illustrated guide to growing and cooking seasonal produce. “I think that it’s important for all designers to be good at drawing, even if their work is completely digital,” she stresses.”Drawing is such an immediate way to jot down ideas and iterate. It’s much more fluid than working ideas out digitally.”
“These days I keep busy with my illustration and sign painting jobs,” she says. “But I’m always looking for ways to bring those skills together. So far, murals, and food packaging have been two of my favorite ways to accomplish that.” And when she’s not working on illustration and lettering projects, you can find her playing in her garden, cooking up something tasty, beekeeping, or rock climbing with friends.
