Nollaig Shona with Fuchsia MacAree

Take an inside look at the creation of this year’s To Be Irish Christmas card with illustrator Fuchsia MacAree and get inspired to create your own festive card at home!

In this piece I was thinking about the patterns that are highlighted in the Irish landscape when it snows. Fields are turned white, while hedges and trees are still visible. This contrast was something fun to play with visually, so I built up a scene and story from that starting point.

I love the feeling of going outside in the cold, moving and warming up — confronting the winter head on — so a hillwalking scene developed. The feeling of returning from a cold walk back into a cosy house is one of my favourite Christmas feelings.

I was also thinking about the Irish diaspora feeling a sense of connection with friends and family far away, so I drew one walker looking at someone sledding in the distance, and feeling a sense of shared experience with them from afar. I love including little familiar details of Irish life, so the characters are walking past a trail waymarker and the Sugarloaf is visible in the background.

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Fuchsia MacAree makes character-based illustrations. Her work highlights quiet moments of contemplation, details in nature and observations from everyday Irish life, and uses simplified perspectives and a distinctive colour palette. She received a BDes in Visual Communication in NCAD in 2011, followed by an MA in Illustration in Camberwell in London in 2012. In 2018 she illustrated the bestselling and award-winning Great Irish Weather Book with Gill Books. Her most recent solo exhibition was in Hang Tough in Dublin in July of last year. She has exhibited and been published worldwide.