Melt into Steph Hardy’s soft illustrations of sweet treats and “bad day” snacks

When Steph Hardy’s work last caught our eye, the artist was dedicated to depicting the euphoric beauty of nature with dreamlike compositions. This fixation on plants: “redrawing them, abstracting and re-interpreting” helped Steph to get a sense of her process, she tells us. But her work has since spilled over into subjects outside of birds, butterflies and trees: “recently it’s been more characterful snacks and critters than just plants,” Steph says.

Straying away from nature and sketching things like cars used to be Steph’s idea of “drawing hell”, she tells us, but this new foray into a range of different subjects has produced things like her recent drawing of a fruit truck. The artist has also turned her brush to a number of tasty sweet treats and snacks from stacks of pancakes to slices of toast with funny expressions, all in her signature soft and fuzzy style. While nature still inspires the illustrator, she is now focused on applying the same sense of movement and fluidity to her layouts of plants and wildlife to whatever it is she is trying to capture on the page.

As food has taken over as her focus, Steph has a new take on colour: “It’s definitely leant more into the painterly side,” she says, and new palettes have emerged from the different textures and surfaces of food the illustrator has drawn – like her airy line up of deserts that look like they would melt in the mouth. Now finding that colour tends to be her starting point, Steph carefully plans her palette’s before starting the delicate layering and blending process that builds up each digital piece.

This personal work has led Steph to a number of editorial illustration commissions both immersed in the natural world and beyond – you may have spotted the illustrator’s work in The New York Times Wordle Review or Bloomberg Business Weekly. A “plant-free” commission that the artist got the chance to work on this year that consisted of a series of illustrations for Queer Atmosphere, an inclusive and diverse collective of ceramic artists across the US, which saw Steph shape up a set of visuals surrounding wet clay and messy hands in collaboration with Brooklyn-based branding studio Coldcuts for the organisations new visual identity. “I love how they saw how my play with painterly colour could work for wet clay, fire and raku glazing,” she says.

For the next phase of her creative work, Steph has been set on making things move, progressing her fluid mark making into compositions where flowers float out of frame or critters crawl, and even small things like the slow stir of an iced coffee come to life. This progression into animation is what’s most exciting to Steph about her practice at present, it’s a way to gamify her personal projects and stay inspired and to prolific. Sticking to some rules surrounding colour palettes and composition has meant that the illustrator has been able to develop motion languages in her work that feel true to her in this shift: “even the most simple rules really help in the journey to something a little new,” she ends.