The art. The paper. The slightly chaotic people behind it.
Ink + Fold is our family-run Australian print studio. We have been printing things since 2009, launched Ink + Fold in 2017, and still spend a frankly unreasonable amount of time turning colour, artwork and slightly ridiculous ideas into wrapping paper, gifts and lovely things people get weirdly attached to.
I draw the stuff. Watercolour artist. Digital artist. Printer of things. Co-runner of the family business. Occasional wrangler of chaos.
The designs start with an actual artist.
A huge part of Ink + Fold begins with me drawing, painting, building colour palettes and turning ideas into artwork that can live on wrapping paper, personalised gifts and all the other surfaces we decide deserve a better personality.
I’m a watercolour artist and digital artist, so the work usually starts with paint, pixels or both. Sometimes a design begins as a beautiful visual idea. Sometimes it begins as someone saying something ridiculous out loud and me immediately deciding it would look excellent on paper.
We like things colourful, clever and full of character. The wrapping should feel like part of the gift, not just the bit you rip off on the way to the interesting part.
We take the work seriously. Not always ourselves.
Ink + Fold is polished where it matters: the artwork, the printing, the quality and the finished product. But we never wanted the brand to feel stiff, corporate or like it had lost all sense of fun in a filing cabinet.
So yes, we are a proper studio with years of experience. We are also the sort of people who looked at a banana, added an Ink + Fold sticker and thought, “Perfect. Put that on the About page.”
We also have a rural property. Because apparently we enjoy projects.
Outside the print studio, life spills out onto our rural Queensland property. There are animals, paddocks, muddy jobs, plants, half-finished ideas and the general kind of cheerful chaos that tends to find its way back into the work.
It is a big part of why Ink + Fold feels so Australian. The characters, colour and sense of humour are shaped by real life, not by sitting in a boardroom trying to invent a personality with a whiteboard marker.
Country life feeds the artwork in all sorts of sneaky ways. The animals, the landscape, the everyday mess and the funny little moments all help shape the style and characters that keep showing up in our range.
How we got from one printer to all of this.
The actual story contains more late nights, coffee and “what if we printed this too?” moments than this, but this is the tidy version.
We start printing things.
Personalised products, ideas, experiments and the beginning of a print studio that would keep growing.
Ink + Fold arrives.
Wrapping paper gets its own colourful universe and presents finally get the dramatic outfits they deserve.
Still printing. Still drawing. Still adding ideas.
Artist-led, Australian designed, family run and still mildly incapable of leaving a blank surface alone.
Australian designed. Family run. Artist made.
Thanks for backing a small family business, supporting original artwork and helping us keep this colourful little circus running. We genuinely love making beautiful things that make people smile before the gift has even been opened.
