Brand Story
Sugar Drip
was born in 2020 and originally began as a custom press on nails business. After 3 years of creating custom, hand painted press ons, I knew I have to pivot the brand into my real passion (art & design), as most creatives will tell you - if you're an artist who is not creating, you're probably insufferable to be around.
Since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of being a fashion designer. I designed before I could even read or write. I studied fashion and interiors at Belfast metropolitan college, then I studied fashion online in New York with The Academy of Art before continuing studies a few years later with Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. I have a passion for sustainable fashion and I enjoy up cycling thrifted garments and using dead stock material to create pieces for my side project, Orchid Blood. My love for fashion and design has to materialize into something, and Sugar Drip is somewhere I can fulfill the needs for both the artist and designer in me.
Since becoming
a full time stay at home mum to 2 babies only 13 months apart, my time for designing and sewing started to dwindle, but as any creative will tell you - it’s imperative to your mental health to create. So while sewing is something of a rarity for me these days, art and design is not and is something I’ve continued to make a priority around raising my family.
That being said, it can be very isolating to be a stay at home mum. I found community with groups online for goth girls and alt mamas and this is where I noticed something…a concerning increase in use of Ai generative art, and specifically, pinup art.
It became clear to me that we as humans love to have fun with our image and see ourselves through different eyes. I understand how tempting the use of Ai generative art is as someone who has participated myself before learning the harm that Ai use has on our planet. Since Ai art has a started dominating our timelines and for you pages over the last couple of years, discourse has began online with one side saying STOP THE USE of Ai and receive ridicule if you don’t, and the other saying that it’s just for “fun” and everything we enjoy as humans does harm to the planet.
I took this onboard and decided that I wanted to try and fight the use of Ai generative art and bring back commissioning human art from human artists. I knew that this would be hard work and would require sacrifice, but that’s something I’m more than willing to do for a cause that I believe in.
So, I designed a pay what you want system, or a ‘sliding scale’ to make custom digital art affordable, accessible and inclusive. While I’ve been doing digital art for close to 10 years, creating custom digital art pinup portraits wasn’t something I have many examples to show for a portfolio. I asked the group that inspired this pursuit if anyone would be interested in becoming a muse for me, and the response was intense! So many wanted to see themselves in this way, I ended up picking more muse volunteers than I originally planned in. With that, I also learned that this was something that gave confidence to the muse/customer. Body positivity had always been important to me, so this project now stood on so many important issues for me. Fighting Ai, inclusivity, body positivity and feminism.
Now,
I have a steady stream of incoming orders for custom pinup portraits and I’ve added more services for art and design to my offerings. Sugar drip, to me, is more than a brand - it’s a piece of me. It’s activism. Its community. It’s human.
Join me and the other muses by following along the sugar drip socials, and stalk what I do when I’m not designing on my personals.