I am the owner and illustrator of Gingiber. I have been an illustrator for 15+ years and have successfully sold my artwork across several categories such as art licensing, wholesale, direct to customer sales, direct downloads, books, teaching, and more. I cannot wait to teach you how to do the same!
Today we’re continuing our student feature series with Elizabeth Berglund! If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, please check out Emily Johnson and Kirsten Katz’s stories– you’re sure to love them.
This week, Elizabeth is sharing her road to my flagship course, Leverage Your Art, and how it changed her perspective as an artist. I can’t wait to share it all with you!
Elizabeth Berglund is a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and art director in Memphis, Tennessee. For work, she mostly focuses on branding for her clients, but she has always dreamed of creating more for herself.
Elizabeth previously took a class on surface design, fell in love with it, and wanted to make it a profitable part of her business. Her goal was to scale back on graphic design clients and transform surface design into consistent streams of income.
Before Elizabeth took Leverage, she struggled to work on art for herself and develop her skills. Because she was knee-deep in branding, she had become used to making designs in other people’s voices, but she wanted to find her own.
Elizabeth felt like she was left behind as she saw younger artists living her dream and making the work they wanted to make. She wanted to make time to make art for herself, but she would let her client work get in the way. In the end, she was inspired enough by her mom starting a business when she was almost 50 that she ended up deciding to take the leap.
There are SO many free workshops out there for beginning entrepreneurs, and Elizabeth had tried some, but felt they were lacking. After all, most of them ended up just being pitches for paid classes, without much helpful information.
However, when she found Stacie’s mini course, she noticed it was different– Elizabeth learned a lot, which made her confident that Leverage Your Art was truly the right investment for her. Watching Stacie give 1:1 portfolio reviews and tell the truth about her journey of slow growth inspired Elizabeth to jump in!
At the end of the 8 weeks of taking Leverage, Elizabeth truly realized the value of everything she had learned in the course. She had a nice body of work to start pitching to art directors, and felt confident about every step she needed to take to find success.
Leverage helped her carve out time for herself, get in the right headspace to play and explore, and made her realize that even short period times like half an hour could help her figure out her true artistic voice.
Since Leverage, she’s consistently received good, motivating feedback about her work, and feels amazing about her progress. She’s continued to consistently make more work and learn her signature style!
Not only that, but Elizabeth has opened a Spoonflower shop, made a lookbook, carried out market research, created a section on her website for surface design, and attended Surtex to observe artist and buyer conversations.
While she is continuing art direction with her clients, she’s found ways to gain ground with her personal art goals.
Elizabeth used to be opposed to starting her own product line because she didn’t know how to balance ethical production and accessible pricing, but she loved the lesson on ethical sourcing, and is now excited to start that part of her business.
Elizabeth felt a personal bond with Stacie because of the way she isn’t obsessed with carefully curating a perfect persona, she encourages slow growth, she’s open about her challenges and mistakes, and she shares a wealth of knowledge about succeeding in the art world.
On a deeper level, Stacie happens to have the same diagnosis as Elizabeth, and she spoke about it in the context of being a business owner. It was details like this that really sealed the deal for Elizabeth, and made her feel seen.
Elizabeth recommends Stacie’s course, Leverage Your Art, to all fellow artists who want to create a purposefully profitable business that they’re proud of.
If you’d like to hear more true stories about how Leverage Your Art impacted real students’ lives, keep an eye out for future posts here on the blog! We’re going to keep sharing past students’ perspectives and celebrating their wins, because they’re why we do all this in the first place!
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
