Melanie Sampson is a graphic artist raised in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL, who now resides in Auburn, NS. Her work focuses on typography and digital graphics; she creates greeting cards and other items for her business “hi, love. greetings.” as well as custom design work through her second business Bakeapple Creative. Sampson runs her businesses with a focus on sustainability, creating in small batches to minimize waste, with many items made to order.
Sampson began making handmade cards as young as age four, and spent her childhood learning traditional skills like beading, baking, sewing and painting with her grandmother. She worked for 17 years as a broadcaster, promotions manager and brand manager in the radio industry, holding positions at Stingray Media, Newcap Radio, The Evanov Radio Group and MBS Radio, before leaving to pursue her art in August 2022. “I wanted to dive into processes and projects that weren’t accessible to me timewise when holding down a really demanding full time job,” [1] she says about the move. It was during her time in the radio industry that Sampson began teaching herself skills in and experimenting with the digital tools that are her preferred drawing medium, like Adobe Illustrator.
“I’ve always just used a mouse and computer,” Sampson says about her drawing process, adding that she also has an older tablet that she’s been digitally fingerpainting on. “It’s such a fun, literal hands-on experience…sort of childlike in a way,” she says. This youthful approach is how she created her first collection, Northern Lights, tying the method of making to the collection’s ethos as a sort of shorthand for her childhood in Labrador. “I was obsessed with the northern lights as a kid,” Sampson says. “The legend we were told was that you had to sing to the sky to make them dance.” In the future she hopes to develop animation skills to make her own images of them dance.
Sampson plans to continue creating collections with an upcoming “tastes of home” series that will feature bakeapples, char, partridgeberry and more. She also hopes to begin adding traditional materials into her work, like adding sealskin to her greeting cards in memory of work on sealskin scraps with her grandmother. “I’ve found that the older I get, the more I miss home,” she says about the enduring inspiration that her childhood in Happy Valley-Goose Bay provides. “I want to create things that are from those memories.”