Behind The Scenes With Louise Mulgrew

Louise Mulgrew is a talented artist and creative, known for her beautiful cards featuring adorable animals. Today, she joins us to share her journey of discovering her passion, building a thriving business and drawing inspiration from the natural world.

I was a child who could have done arts and crafts all day long. Throughout high school and college, all my spare time was spent in the art department, making every single sketchbook page unnecessarily layered and extravagant. I then did an art foundation course in Brighton before doing my Illustration degree at Loughborough Uni. I completely stumbled into starting my business when finishing uni, mostly I was just avoiding getting a ‘real job’. I didn’t have a lot of design skills that were suited to a real job; mostly, I was just good at analogue skills like drawing and painting. 

I’ve been so lucky in the years since to have built a business creating greeting cards. I think greeting cards are simply the perfect art project: they’re small (I love tiny things), they’re affordable – so people can enjoy a big variety of them, and they get used for something so special - connecting with loved ones. 

Lots has happened in my career so far, we’ve built our UK indie customers to more than 600 shops, we supply dream stores like The National Trust, Waterstones and John Lewis, we sell our cards all around the world and we’ve even won a few industry awards! But I’m most proud of creating illustrations that resonate with people, and I hope I get to do that for many years to come.

All my designs start out as one of many pencil scribbles in my journal or sketchbook. I use a variety of media for the painting, including pen and ink and gouache, combining colourful washes and intricate paint details with a lot of white space to create characterful illustrations that capture the essence of their furry real-life counterparts. I then do a little bit of rubbing out and repositioning in Photoshop until it’s feeling just right. I love the physicality of creating and I try to preserve this handmade, hand-painted feel all the way through to the final printed card.

I love to take inspiration from all sorts of places. Of course, animals and the natural world. My colour pallets are very influenced by colours you’d see together in nature, in a cottage garden for example; I love all the different earthy greens and yellows contrasting with pastel pinks and cornflower blues and the bright red of a ladybird. I really enjoy travelling and take a lot of inspiration from different cultures, landscapes and architecture in my personal work. 

Little white buildings with terracotta roof tops are one of my favourite subjects for my travel sketchbooks. Some of my other favourite forms of art are children’s picture books (I have an extensive collection), book covers, especially old vintage books, and handmade pottery: I collect a handmade tile from every country I visit and take the treasure hunt for my tile very seriously! 

I'm really proud of our charitable collaborations. One of the charities we support is called   Rewilding Britain and we pledge to donate 1% of our turnover. I love how close to home this work is, the Knepp estate is local to where I live and has been a big part of the UK rewilding mission so far, and I believe strongly that rewilding will play a pivotal part in slowing down further degradation of our planet and in the recovery of what we have already lost. 

The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is a charity very close to my heart. I visited their elephant orphanage in Nairobi National Park during my second year of university and it was the first I'd learned of the incredible and far-reaching work they do to protect and preserve wildlife in Kenya.

It marked a poignant time in my development and direction as an illustrator, and was really the inspiration for me to start painting animals for the very first time. Many years later, elephants feature often in my card designs and are still my favourite to paint. We’ve donated more than £70,000 since 2019, through our 1% of turnover donation, and helped the charity raise quite a lot more through sales of the Christmas cards and stationery products I have designed with them over the years.

I had a life-changing visit to the Trust this past May to prepare for a special project we are doing together and I can’t wait to share more about that soon.

I love that I get to be creative for a job. Creating something that didn’t exist before is such a good feeling. And seeing my artwork come to life, from the first thumbnail scribble in my journal to a printed greeting card sitting on the shelf of a lovely local shop, it’s just really special. And then to see other people connecting with my illustrations and choosing my cards to send for their most important snail mail is truly an honour.

I love to take time to write a card to a loved one out of the blue and I do like a niche caption for this. We have a new design launching together in the mini cards with the caption ‘sending hugs’ with two monkeys in a tight hug. I think it’s such a kind and intimate message and one that I could send over and over again, for any occasion.

I think it’s the characterisation of my animals that people connect with most. I take a lot of care to try to capture the gestures, expressions and movement of an animal but with an extra touch of silliness worked in. I think also the tininess is quite lovely. My original paintings often need to be blown up when I scan them in to Photoshop, even to fit on a 120mm x 90mm card.

I guess I wish I’d known that you have time. It’s easy to feel like everything needs to be achieved all at once, always in a hurry, always building. I think social media especially can create such a panic in us that everyone appears to be further ahead in one way or another. I feel like I’ve spent too much time striving for the next goal instead of enjoying the stage I’m at and what I’ve already achieved. I wish I’d known to be a bit more grateful for, and content in the present moment. That’s something I’m hoping to achieve with The Art File collaboration.

The same advice I give to myself now (and don’t always follow): make art every day-ish. I love the famous quote from Maya Angelou: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” There is a warm and comforting momentum that bubbles away when you are consistently creating and it takes the pressure off when trying new things and experimenting. It also helps to prevent too many of the dreaded ‘starting-scaries’.

Ooh I love hobbies. Anything creative of course: pottery painting, working in my sketchbook, sewing, crocheting. And also anything where I can spend lots of time in nature: travelling, hiking, long country walks, running. And then yoga, breathwork meditations and reading to get out of my head

The Art File is thrilled to launch its exclusive card collection with Louise Mulgrew from February 2026. You can shop over 300 of Louise's birthday, occasions and Christmas cards on The Art File website from next month.