In the early days, Sarah tried to avoid a creative career. “I thought I wouldn’t get paid anything, so I did a degree in environmental science,” she says. But she quickly realised the sciences weren’t for her and at the end of her degree got a job at a newspaper laying out adverts using Photoshop and InDesign. Then she did a course in interactive media and was getting into the swing of things when she had children and “everything stopped”. Though not quite, as she was still teaching herself behind the scenes, alongside managing babies. She set up the Lomond Paper Co in 2015 when the girls were quite small. “We’re in Helensburgh and there’s a lovely Scandi shop. The lady who runs it helped me with my designs. She started selling them and then other shops started and my confidence grew from there.”
The designs are made purely on the iPad. “I’m a completely digital artist now, I work in Procreate - you can do anything in that app. I love to make it look like it’s painted and I use gouache and pencils. Doing it digitally speeds up the process a lot and I can get new designs out much more quickly which helps me scale up if I need to provide a wide range of cards to a shop. I know lots of people are designing more traditionally but doing the interactive media course reaffirmed to me that everyone uses a different process, that’s fine. What’s important is the end result.
