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!
I am BEYOND excited to share another one of my students’ success stories with you this week! Today we’re talking about Brittany Warner-Smith, one of my past Leverage Your Art students. I really find Brittany’s story so inspiring, and I hope you do too!
Brittany Warner-Smith is a full-time artist who considers herself a bit of a nomad, and she currently lives in Massachusetts.
She has an Etsy shop, website, online shop, and she licenses her work. Brittany does murals, design, patterns, and lettering, and she’s part of artistic communities in her area, because she’s so passionate about connecting with fellow artists.
Brittany travels around as much of the US as she can, and even spends some time abroad! She has so many stories to share, but we’re going to sum up her artistic journey nicely for you today.
Brittany has been an artist since childhood, trying out every version of crafts, art, and design to find what she truly loves.
Her professional career as an artist has been entirely unique– Brittany has been a tattoo artist, a footwear designer, a pattern designer, a small business owner, and much more.
Because Brittany loves learning and novelty, she has always had a pattern of going back to school, taking more and more workshops and classes that practically span the entire world of art. She loved seeing how all of her past work informed her new creations.
As Brittany got older, she realized that she wanted to stop putting off the business side of being an artist, and create a lucrative career, but the idea of having long-term plans stressed her out. She valued freedom and enjoyment in her business, but knew it was time for things to change.
According to Brittany, for a long time, she was flying by the seat of her pants– creating what she wanted to create and seeing what happened. She didn’t have structure or plans in place for her art business, and she kept hitting the same walls.
For one, Brittany’s studies showed her that every artistic discipline had a very specific set of rules, and they all contradicted each other. The worlds of tattooing, illustration, fine arts, typography, and more each taught her sets of best practices that felt like they weren’t meant to be combined. It made her feel like she had to choose one “world” and stay there.
She had some other hang ups as well, like the concept that her art all had to be either exactly the same style and subjects, or that it all had to be distinct from her other works of art.
After a while in the tattoo industry, Brittany had physical injuries that made her doctors advise her to choose another, more physically sustainable path.
Not only did each corner of the art world have rules about the art, they also had very distinct predetermined paths. Brittany needed help finding a path that worked for her, that didn’t follow the steps her peers were following.
As a 4.0 student, Brittany expected that success in her art business would happen naturally, but over time, she realized that she needed expert advice on how to make her own path, bring structure into her business, and make moves that would propel her into a lucrative future in the art world. She also wanted the freedom to travel, be her own boss, and avoid hustle culture as she pulled all of this off.
Brittany needed a mentor who could outline a plan for an artist like her– one who had a complex artistic path, and wanted to make a living and still have a life.
Most of all, she didn’t want to start from ground zero. She wanted to find a way to combine all of the knowledge, art, products, and connections she already had to find success.
Brittany was on the search for experienced mentors, and she said she was drawn to Stacie because she is kind, honest, shows up as her authentic self, and talks about her own insecurities. Stacie had already gone through the “scary parts” of running an art business first, like being heckled on the internet, and could show the way through them from true experience.
The concept of leveraging your art also appealed to Brittany, because it showed her that she could continually take action, even when she was in a period of waiting. She likens it to farming– you plant some seeds in part of the field, and don’t just wait for them to grow. You go to a new plot and plant a different crop, and continue doing that throughout the year. She visualized her different income streams as the different plots of land as she tended to each section of her business.
Brittany recommends Leverage Your Art, because it helps you become sure of your goals, helps you learn why you can achieve them, and gives you the steps of how to get there. It doesn’t require an art degree, and in fact teaches the business side that art school didn’t teach her.
She felt that Leverage Your Art connected the dots between where she was and where she wanted to be in a way that no other course had. She even convinced a friend to take the course because that’s how much she believed in it!
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.
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