How I Started My Own Art Business

Hi! If you’ve found my page and are reading it now, I just want to say THANK YOU for being here!! I’m excited to share my story with you and I hope you’ll come along on my journey.

A little bit about me. . .I’m an artist. I live in Charleston, South Carolina and work out of a home studio. My main medium is acrylic painting, but sometimes I like to incorporate mixed media, use gouache, or watercolor, and I love oil pastels. There’s just something about the brilliance of the color that I can’t resist! (Ha, no pun intended. If you didn’t catch that, oil pastels create a natural resist when painting with mediums like ink or watercolor.). At the moment, I’ve been working on a “Coastal Wetlands” collection which you can see here. There’s just so much awesome wildlife and scenery in the area where I live—egrets, herons, ibises, osprey, even belted kingfishers and wood storks! I also love to garden. Painting and gardening are the two worlds in my life where none of the other worlds exist once I get into it. I love growing things from seed and seeing how they grow. At the moment, the garden is full of native blanketflowers, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and elephant ears! I hope to incorporate some more natives as the springs pass. You might see some florals in my artwork here and there too although I really love landscapes at the moment.

So how did I get here? I’ve always been interested in art. I was that kid all through grade school who took every single art class available. If I could have taken it every semester, I would had, but alas, the requirement for other electives. As an adult, I would dabble and create. I got to the point though where, I would create, and it was good, but it wasn’t improving. I found some local artists and started taking lessons for a couple of years, but then sadly, they closed the program. I continued to dabble, but really needed more direction. Then along came The Confident Brush by the amazing Natalie Parker. Natalie did online classes, which was super convenient because well, it was the Covid epidemic at the time and I am a mama to two small littles (more on them later.). The first lesson I ever did with Nat was the Mixed Media Landscapes course. (Not sure yet how to insert a photo here, but the photo in the beginning was the painting I created during this course.) Needless to say, I was hooked. I signed up as a member, continued my lessons, and started flying. All the new ideas and techniques were water to my thirsty artist soul and I gobbled up the information and community as fast as lessons were released. Fast forward a bit and the Art Biz A-Z course was released and I signed up. Never ever did I think I was actually going to become a “real artist.” That just seemed like some far off idea that other people got to do. But I took it, and I followed the steps, and I’m still following the steps, but here I am. I’m selling my art on the regular and getting myself out there everyday. It’s incredible. And intense. And harrowing. And awesome. And if you’ve made it this far into the blog, I’m just so so grateful for you and all the others out there supporting me in this journey to bring beauty to the world and allowing me to put myself out there into your world for just a moment. Hang tight, folks, because there’s only more good things to come. Thanks again for dropping by and until next time!

For those who would like to follow my journey in the day to day, here are my social media links below. To get first dibs to all my collection releases, exclusive discounts, and behind the scenes info, sign up for my newsletter at http://eepurl.com/hRVfAX. II’d love to have you along!