'It's like being a part of the  history of Cork': Meet the Holly Bough cover artist

Drawing has been a part of life for Cork woman Susan Mulcahy for as long as she can remember.

“I suppose since I was a child, I’ve been drawing. Me and my sister used to have our whole room covered in different drawings, like, every part of the wall. My dad used to come down and tell us stories at night, and he used to look at all the different pictures, and he’d build stories with all the different characters we had on the wall,” says Susan.

“We were always making magazines, doing logos..We were obsessed with art. It was my favourite thing in school.”

After the Leaving Cert, Susan decided to pursue a qualification in graphic design at MTU.

“It was the best course, and I made all my friends there,” she recalls. “I loved it and it made my art become something practical that I could turn into a job.”

While Susan was passionate about her course, she says that after college she didn’t have the confidence to immediately work in the area. She had a job she really enjoyed in Brown Thomas, and she worked there for a number of years.

During a two-week holiday one summer, she decided to set up a wedding invitation business on Etsy. “I think I only sold one set of wedding invitations off it, but a couple of days later, one of my friends from college who spotted it, told me they were looking for a graphic designer in the company he was working for that did wedding stationery too,” says Susan.

It was serendipitous. “Within a week of posting that Etsy listing, I was now suddenly a graphic designer.”

Susan recalls her time at Wedding Scribblers and Babelfís as “the golden years”. She became studio director, and says her confidence as a designer flourished.

However, when the covid pandemic hit, she found working from home without the team a challenge. In the evenings, Susan started to draw again, something she says she didn’t have time to do before the pandemic. She decided to set up an Instagram to showcase her pieces, and said that it was something of a surprise when people started wanting to buy her prints.

As interest grew, she started to rethink her career.

“I took another two weeks off, and I decided to build a range of products for my first pop-up shop, which wasn’t really a pop-up shop at all. It was actually a car boot sale in Fountainstown in the middle of a car park. I built up a range of stuff, and I set up my stall next to a big, huge puddle. For the first hour, people were only asking if they could buy the fake plants that I had on the table and I was mortified. But actually, then it was like a really successful day. Lots of people bought lots of stuff, and it went from there,” said Susan.

It gave the artist the push to build a collection, and after a year of creating new works alongside working as a graphic designer, Susan decided to take a leap of faith and turn Saucy Pups into a full-time endeavour.

Four weeks later, she opened her first pop-up shop in Douglas Village shopping centre, something she says she couldn’t have done without the support of her family. “I had to design everything that went into the shop, the whole shop itself. All the fixtures and fittings we were building in my kitchen. Everyone was on packing duty. That shop was a real family thing. They were helping me with deliveries and building everything and working behind the counter and stacking this up and everything,” she recalls.

Susan continues to run regular pop-ups, but since then has also had plenty of commissions including murals and stairwells, corporate projects, and homeware lines, in addition to her online shop.

Today, her distinctive work is recognisable by her use of bright colours and detailed patterns.

“I like putting details into things. I like hiding details, hiding myself or people I know, or my dogs,” she says.

While Susan does much of her sketching on an iPad, she says her projects always start with a pen and paper. “For me, I think when you go straight to digital, your brain stops being creative. I need to like scribble things down on paper first.”

The process for creating the Holly Bough cover started with taking pictures of the Lough.

“I went out, and I took some photos just for reference, but I could picture in my head exactly what I wanted it to look like. I sketched it out on a piece of paper first just to get the composition and the layout the way I wanted it, and then I moved to my iPad,” explained Susan.

The process involves building layers and added in all the small details like the feathers on the geese.

“My vision of it was that it was the Lough without any people, which is actually unusual for me. I normally have people bustling around in the background, but I wanted this to be like very early on a Christmas morning when it’s just the ducks and the geese out there. And I just thought it’d be fun that they’d all be wearing Christmas hats and that they’d be all having their own little Christmas while it’s like still and the air is crispy and there’s nobody around.”

Susan vividly remembers driving past the Lough as a child at Christmas after her family would visit friends or relatives.

“The Christmas lights in the crib are on, and the little kind of lanterns all around are lit, and it just gives me Central Park vibes with the lighting at night. And it’s always just a cosy feeling of, do you know that song, Driving Home for Christmas? They’re all kind of tied together in my head, just that feeling of being young, going home, and you’re cosy in the backseat of the car, and it’s Christmas time, and like the air feels like it’s Christmas time. It’s all very exciting.”

Family is central to Susan’s memories of Christmas, and her favourite memories bring her back to her family home.

“My mum used to bake loads of Christmas cakes. The house used to always be smelling lovely and kind of citrusy and with warm, steaminess coming out of the kitchen, and you’d have to be really quiet, because, if you made any noise, the cakes would drop.”

Today, her family continues to be a huge support.

“My family are the best part of my whole life...I have two brothers, Peter and Paul, and my sister, Helen; she’s like the powerhouse behind everything. She’s amazing... And my dad, like everything for all of the shops that I did, like he dropped everything. He was building units. My dad’s amazing.”

Susan says her mum, who passed away in recent years, was always her biggest supporter. “She’s the most important person to me as well. And everything I do, I do for her.”

Creating the cover for this year’s Holly Bough is a great source of pride for Susan.

“Seeing the covers by Jason O’Gorman and Fiona Foley, I thought it was so cool. I had my eyes set on it for years and thought, wouldn’t I love to do something like that. It’s like being a part of history of Cork. It’s genuinely an honour.”

See saucypups.com

This article appeared in the 2026 Holly Bough.