Diana Heom’s Illustrations Move from Cookbook Pages to Personalized Pet Portraits

Diana Heom’s work moves between two kinds of intimacy: the useful detail of a cookbook illustration and the personal recognition of a pet portrait. Based in Hood River, Oregon, the illustrator and graphic designer brings experience in print, editorial design, art direction, project management, web design, and book and magazine production to commissions ranging from wedding invitations to websites. Her portfolio offers a practical look at how illustration can serve both a publication’s instructions and a customer’s attachment to a familiar animal.

Heom recently joined the Directory of Illustration. She has worked in design for 10 years, and illustration became a larger part of her practice after she earned a degree in graphic design and began her career in the field. While working for a book publisher, she created food illustrations for cookbooks at Williams-Sonoma. That early work connected her design background with a subject she still enjoys drawing.

From vector forms to hand-drawn portraits

Heom’s illustration style has changed over time. She began with vector-based work and later moved toward a more realistic, hand-drawn approach. The shift matters because the work now serves different settings: a portrait may need to feel recognizable on a small pet ID tag, while an image in a book has to support a page of information or instructions.

Her small business, Everybody Loves Lulu, takes the portrait work into personalized products. Named for her rescue dog, Lulu, the business makes pet products featuring realistic illustrations based on individual animals. Heom adapts the portraits for items such as ID tags and placemats, giving the drawing a role beyond the page. In this kind of product work, clarity at different sizes is part of the design task: a portrait has to retain enough of an animal’s character to read when it is printed on an object.

The examples below show the work as it appears through the shop. They also point to a useful consideration for illustrators developing product lines: the same subject can travel across formats, but each format changes how much detail viewers can take in. Heom’s shift toward a realistic style gives her a visual language suited to likeness, while the product formats make that likeness something customers can use and keep close.

Heom’s Everybody Loves Lulu website and Instagram offer more examples of the business. For designers, the practice shows how a personal subject can become the foundation for a focused product range, with illustration carrying the connection between the customer’s pet and the finished object.

Illustration built around instructions

Books remain Heom’s favorite kind of illustration project. Two titles she is especially proud to have worked on are This is a Cookbook and Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden. Their scale gives a sense of the sustained work involved: she illustrated the entirety of This is a Cookbook, with more than 150 recipe illustrations and step-by-step cooking projects. For Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden, she illustrated more than 150 fruits and vegetables, along with 20 garden plans and planting methods.

Those assignments place drawing inside a larger information structure. Recipe art accompanies processes that readers follow; garden illustrations help represent plants and approaches to growing them. In a book, that means each image has to contribute to a sequence, not only stand on its own. The volume of illustrations also calls for visual consistency across many subjects. A reader should be able to move from one page to the next and recognize a coherent hand, even as the content changes from a recipe to a fruit or a planting plan.

The images below offer a glimpse of Heom’s food illustration work. For illustrators working on similar projects, the underlying challenge is a familiar one: make each subject engaging while keeping the drawing useful in context. A picture that supports a recipe or garden guide has to fit the page’s purpose and sit comfortably alongside written steps and other images.

A personal series with a built-in visual system

Heom also made a personal project that tracks each trimester of her pregnancy. Using watercolor pencil, she drew a fruit corresponding to the baby’s size in each week. The premise turns a changing measurement into a repeatable visual format: a weekly marker, represented by a fruit, gives the series an organizing rule that viewers can follow over time.

That structure is a useful design idea in its own right. A recurring unit can make a personal record easier to scan, while changes in the subject provide variation from one image to the next. Here, watercolor pencil gives the series a different material approach from Heom’s earlier vector-based illustrations and realistic pet portraits. The work brings a personal experience into a sequence of images without losing the clarity of its organizing concept.

Across book pages, garden guides, pet products, and a personal series, Heom’s work shows illustration moving between explanation and connection. Her Directory of Illustration portfolio and website bring these parts of her practice together. For a designer choosing a direction for an illustration project, her range is a reminder to begin with the job the image needs to do: guide a reader, identify a subject, or make an everyday object feel personal.