seaurchin ... England

Artist: Lisa Stevens
Business: seaurchin or c-urchin
Web sites: seaurchin.etsy.com, c-urchin.blogspot.com, c-urchin.deviantart.com
Location: Bristol, England

What do you create?
I create unusual, experimental ceramic pieces, often with the inclusion of glass. Mostly these take the form of ceramic pendants, but my true love is the larger sculptures.


Where and when do you do your creative work?
Erm... mostly on my sofa, in front of the telly in the evening! One day I will have a proper workshop! My kiln is in the garage, but I do also attend a weekly ceramics evening class... at the moment I am learning to throw.


Do you have another "day job"?
Well, I'm a Mum. I have a three-year-old son. So technically I did not leave my day job to follow my art, but to have a baby! Before that I was one of the senior sculptors at Aardman Animations in Bristol, making plasticene puppets for animated films and series, such as Creature Comforts, Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit – The Curse of the Wererabbit. If you're looking for credits though... I'm credited with my maiden name, Lisa Newport.


Where and what did you study?
I studied in the seaside town of Worthing on the south coast. I did a Theatre Design HND (shorter and less academic/more practical than a degree). I specialised in costume design and construction, but I also loved making the scale models of the sets and characters.


Where do you find inspiration?
My main inspiration is the clay itself! I love the way you can do practically anything with it. I love the chemical reactions between the glass and glaze and love experimenting! Texture wise... I take inspiration from sea creatures, geology, pollen and honeycombs amongst others. I love the graphic illustrations of Earnst Haeckle.


What motivates you?
Making things is as much a need as exercise and eating fruit... I feel ill if I don't make anything for a while!

When did you start doing this?
I started my ceramics course about six years ago, but it took a couple of years to find my style.


Do you remember getting into art as a kid?
I always did it! Apparently my Mum was told by the nursery teacher, when I was three, that I was going to be an artist! I guess it always gave me a sense of satisfaction.


When and why did you decide to start your own business?
I have been on Etsy for nearly a year now. I had sold a few pieces before at craft fairs before that, but basically Etsy gave me the opportunity to sell and therefore develop my work. It was, and still is, a way to make some money without having to leave my son in full time child care. The hours at Aardman were long... I went back for a short contract, but it nearly killed me!


How did you choose the name for your business?
The spherical sculptures I was making look like sea urchins... must make some more of those!

What do you love most about creating your work?
It's always different....I'm often surprised when I open the kiln... it's like alchemy!


What's the most fascinating place you've been?
I love the eroded coastline of the Big Sur in California... ooh, and the Underground Gardens in Fresno... and Yosemite! (That was a great holiday!)

A book you love:
His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.


What is the most interesting thing about you?
Working at Aardman on feature films.

What achievement are you most proud of?
Working on Wallace and Gromit – Curse of the Wererabbit


What advice would you give women starting their own business?
Do something you love.

What's the biggest challenge you face in your work?
There aren't enough hours in the day... or evening.


What do you love to do in your free time?
Other than ceramics? I love walking, especially in woods.

What are you working on right now?
Another batch of pendants, some custom orders, and I hope to make some more sculptural pieces soon.


What do you hope to achieve next?
I intend to open another Etsy shop for handmade supplies. I'd like to exhibit my sculptures in a Gallery.

The Dangerous Mezzo ... Nova Scotia, Canada

Artist: Nina Scott-Stoddart
Business: The Dangerous Mezzo
Web sites: dangerousmezzo.etsy.com, operatic.etsy.com, trunkt.org/dangerousmezzo lunenburgartist.blogspot.com, lunenburgartist.com
Location: Nova Scotia, Canada

What do you create?
Original multi-media collages and acrylic paintings. I also make costume jewellery for myself (and sell a few pieces via Etsy, under the name Operatic).


Where and when do you do your creative work?
Usually in the evening, in my office/studio upstairs in my big old house in the historic town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Sometimes I take some of my stuff down into the nice, warm Red Room downstairs (where the t.v. is) and I'll collage while hanging out with my guy. In good weather (or on vacation) I'll take my clobber outside and paint en plein air.


Do you have another "day job"?
I left my last regular "day job" (library technician) about 15 years ago to pursue my principal art, which is classical singing. (I'm a mezzo soprano, hence my user name!) I am now a professional singer, opera producer and opera director and am pretty busy with it. But my husband David and I moved to Nova Scotia five years ago, which has given me more time to do visual art, which was my first love.


Where and what did you study?
I did a two year college diploma course in library techniques, then went to York University in Toronto for Music and Visual Arts. I have a BFA as a result of that excursion into higher education.


Where do you find inspiration?
I love old black and white glamour photography, as exemplified by photos of opera diva Maria Callas. I also have always loved typography, so I enjoy starting a collage with pages from old books or music manuscripts. For my paintings, I'm inspired by the landscape of Nova Scotia – rocks, sea, trees and old houses.


What motivates you?
Selling my work has been fantastically motivating, for which I thank Etsy. Beyond that, I have two modes of operation, artistically. 1. I plan something carefully, with sketches and studies, and execute it (this generally works for paintings). 2. I start to fling things together and something interesting (or disastrous) emerges (this generally works for collages).


When did you start doing this?
I started collaging about a year ago. I picked up painting again (after a long absence) about five years ago.

Do you remember getting into art as a kid?
Oh yeah. My mother self-published her own text books all through my childhood, so we had, literally, reams of paper lying around. My father's father was a professional artist (an engraver and painter), and my mother's father, my mother's uncle, my mum and dad all painted, to one extent or another. I was surrounded by original art, and it was natural that I start creating my own.


When and why did you decide to start your own business?
I've always been the entrepreneurial type (I've started a few opera companies in my time) so setting up as a freelance artist seemed to make sense. I had been selling some of my work in Nova Scotia, but the principal demand here seemed to be for pretty sea pictures and I was sick to death of doing those. I investigated Etsy because I bought a painting by Heather Murray on Etsy, and it seemed like a perfect venue for me.


How did you choose the name for your business?
Dangerous Mezzo Productions is the name of my opera production company, chosen because of my voice type (I'm a mezzo soprano). My artist website is lunenburgartist.com, but when I signed up on Etsy it was as a buyer (to buy art, natch!). I didn't even think about opening a shop there, at that point, so I just used dangerousmezzo as my user name. About two weeks later, I thought, what the heck, and signed up as a seller. I'm really, really glad that my Etsy shop name is dangerousmezzo – it sums me up much better than lunenburgartist, which is a little too dull.


What do you love most about creating your work?
Getting really messy and sticky! I also love the sense of exploration I have while collaging – there are almost infinite ways the darned things can turn out, and I like trying to feel my way towards when I should stop or when I should keep going. I often get it wrong, but it's a lot of fun!

What's the most fascinating place you've been?
Southwold, on the Suffolk coast of England – I could spend weeks there. It's just a little seaside town, but so relaxing and attractive.


A book you love:
This is really hard, because I'm just about addicted to reading. Okay: Jane Austen (especially Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice); E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia books; mysteries and thrillers by Minette Walters; fantasy by Terry Pratchett.

What is the most interesting thing about you?
I'm not terribly interesting, I don't think. I'm either very funny in person or a complete wallflower.


What achievement are you most proud of?
Starting and running the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop.

What advice would you give women starting their own business?
Just do it. Yeah, do all the planning and so forth, but don't let your fears (or the opinions of other people) stop you from trying something. We all need the courage to just jump in with both feet and risk failing at something. Failing isn't a big deal – but letting fear hold you back from even trying, that's very sad.


What's the biggest challenge you face in your work?
Keeping myself organized enough so that I spend time on all the things I want to do.

What do you love to do in your free time?
I love to sail: my husband and I have a very old, beat up 30-foot classic full keel Alberg sailboat (I demur at calling it a "yacht") which we sail all around the South Shore of Nova Scotia, generally with a drink in one hand... I also ride and teach riding to a few young friends of mine (I fell off my horse a year or so ago, and broke my upper arm, which has set me back a bit). I knit like a mad thing (but no socks, damnit!) and I can't stop reading.


What are you working on right now?
Bigger collaged works – 8 x 10 inches and up. I'm also planning my fourth annual Opera Workshop in Halifax and I'm preparing to sing Carmen in June, which is a huge deal.


What do you hope to achieve next?
I want to get started in encaustic – that's a technique that's fascinated me for some time. One of my favourite Canadian artists, Heather Murray, does some amazing work in encaustic and I really want to explore it. (It's the ancient technique of painting with hot coloured wax – mmm... hot wax...)

Nectar Jewelry Designs ... Pennsylvania, USA

Your name: Sharon Fiorini
Your business name: Nectar Jewelry Designs
Your web site: nectarjewelry.etsy.com
Your location: Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA

What do you create?
Jewelry – sterling silver, polymer clay, and a combination of both sometimes.


Where and when do you do your creative work?
I work at a tiny jeweler's bench in my living room. Since I work full-time and have a family, I create when I can fit it in – usually late at night and on the weekends.

Do you have another "day job"?
I'm also a graphic designer during the day.


Where and what did you study?
I was an art major in college concentrating on printmaking and sculpture. I think that now that I'm doing jewelry, with some of the techniques I use, I'm combining both of those areas of concentrations, just on a much smaller level than I had in the past.


Where do you find inspiration?
I find inspiration in looking more closely at things. I want people to notice the fine details in my work. It's kind of my motto regarding people – don't judge by looking too quickly. Notice who they are, not just what they look like. I like to concentrate on kind of the hard outer shell but there's so much more if you look inside.

What motivates you?
What motivates me is a need to create. If it was painting as a child, drawing, sculpture, papermaking, printmaking, photography, graphic design or jewelry.


When did you start doing this?
I actually started doing jewelry only about 4 years ago when I was pregnant with my son. I started with stringing beads, graduated to wire-wrapping (I did a lot of that), and now I've moved on to metal and more of a mixed media technique when I also use polymer within my metal designs.

Do you remember getting into art as a kid?
Yes! I used to draw on the floor of my parent's basement with glue. They loved that!


When and why did you decide to start your own business?
As I started to do wire-wrapping, I was wearing my jewelry. People were noticing it. So I would bring it in to work and I would also have jewelry parties.

How did you choose the name for your business?
You know, I don't even remember. I think I saw a commercial on TV, Nectar popped into my head and that was it.


What do you love most about creating your work?
I love every aspect of it. When I'm at my day job, I'm constantly sketching new ideas. I have tons of Post-its and pieces of paper with drawings on them of designs I'd like to create. I love the challenge of creating that design that I first saw in my head. And I love that people seem to really like my jewelry – that they find it unique and new and beautiful.

What's the most fascinating place you've been?
I haven't travelled all that much, but I'd have to say that I love San Francisco and NYC.


A book you love:
With my day job, my family, my jewelry, and Etsy, there's no time left to read. I think the last book I read was Night by Elie Wiesel. But mostly, I'm reading books to my son.

What is the most interesting thing about you?
Hmmm, it's maybe not the most interesting but I'm actually pretty shy until I get to know people. I think that's where my inspiration comes from. People sometimes tend to misread shyness as arrogance. I'm totally the opposite – I'm extremely down to earth.


What achievement are you most proud of?
I'm most proud of the fact that I have learned jewelry making completely on my own. Of course, I'm always striving to learn new techniques. There's so much out there!


What advice would you give women starting their own business?
Don't settle and don't give up. If someone tells you they're not interested in your business, keep trying and striving. Listen to your instincts regarding business opportunities. If your instincts are telling you that something doesn't feel right, listen to it. And market, market, market. It's tough out there. You need to keep getting your name and your craft out to the public. I'm always working on that.


What's the biggest challenge you face in your work?
My biggest challenge is finding time to create.

What do you love to do in your free time?
Free time? What's that?


What are you working on right now?
I'm working on a new line of jewelry – mostly sterling. But it doesn't involve soldering at all. I'm trying to find new ways to attach and join using my little "pins". It's always about the details with my jewelry.

What do you hope to achieve next?
I really hope to have my jewelry take off so I can give up the day job. Jewelry is my love, my obsession, my creative outlet. It's what I need to do.

strawberryluna ... Pennsylvania, USA

Artist: Allison / "strawberryluna"
Business: strawberryluna
Web site: strawberryluna.com
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

What do you create?
Mostly screenprinted rock posters and art prints currently, some tshirts too, though I do other design work as well. And undies! I love printing on underwear, it's so fun and playful.


Where and when do you do your creative work?
That's a two-parter for me. I do my design, drawing, and creative work from home usually. I do a lot of sketches in any one of the two or three sketch books that I have floating around, but all of the final work is completed on my computer and lots of it is done on a computer entirely (I'm a Mac girl!) Then, for the printmaking aspect of my work I go to my studio which is a great shared/community space print studio called Artists Image Resource or AIR for short. It's my home away from home.


Do you have another "day job" or did you leave one to pursue your art?
At the moment, I do not have another day job. I've been doing this design and printing thing as my full-time job now for a year and half. I'm really really lucky I get to do what I love for a living.

Where and what did you study?
I studied just about everything but art. Other than art history that is, I think I took every single one of those classes that I possibly could. My education was primarily in literature, linguistics, and developmental psychology. Until I started printing, I never really thought of myself as capable of producing visual art like the people whose work I admired.


Where do you find inspiration?
Anywhere! As cliched as it sounds, it's entirely true. I am as likely to be fascinated by random patterns in a sidewalk as I am by a piece of fine art. When I am looking to recharge my batteries I'll take my dog for a walk in the small woods near our house or maybe page through an art or design book. A lot of times, when I have a project to get started I think about color first, sort of reflexively and often build from there. I really love it when I just stumble upon an old textile pattern or something completely unrelated to what I am working on, and it sparks an idea.


What motivates you?
I love my job, that's the ultimate motivation. There are certainly days where I am tired and stressed out by deadlines or feeling uninspired, but when I think about working my old day job, well, it sort of snaps everything back into place mentally for me. Before I started really working in art and design, I would have these explosions in my head where a fully formed pieces of art but have no way of getting them from inside my head out into the world. So, I always felt like a bit of a logjam was clouding my mind. I still get those explosions, but now I have a release for some of them, and that's a huge motivation as well.


When did you start doing this?
I began screenprinting in November of 2004. I had always wanted to learn how and found out that a community print studio was in my city. They offer an "Open Studio" night where anyone can come in and screenprint once a week for a low fee (currently about $5) and get a real hands on sink-or-swim go at print making. I fell in love almost immediately with screenprinting and started going weekly to work on simple art prints just for fun, just for myself with no expectations of anyone ever seeing them, letting alone buying them. One of my prints caught the eye of a guy who connects poster artists with gigs in Philadelphia and he asked me if I wanted to try making rock posters a go. While being secretly terrified about, I agreed to try. That was in April of 2005 when I did a poster for the band Garbage, and I've been making posters ever since.


Do you remember getting into art as a kid?
I do, major big time. When I was really young I drew constantly as well as built things out of clay and legos almost compulsively. I also grew up writing short stories, from childhood through college. At some point I felt much more comfortable writing than visual arts and just tended to keep working on that rather than drawing. By the time that high school came around I'd begun to think of my creative expression in terms only of the written word. However, I continued to be in love with other people's work.


When and why did you decide to start your own business?
It sounds odd, but doing design and printmaking full-time was actually almost an accident. About a year and a half ago I quit a very stressful day job with every single intention of finding another day gig. My husband, who has a good day job, was incredibly supportive and we agreed that since I had a little bit of freelance work at first, I'd work on that and put off finding a real job for a week or two and then suddenly it was six months later. I'd managed to keep finding just enough work to get me through the next couple of weeks or a month when I realized that is nearly the textbook definition of the freelance life. It felt crazy, like walking off of a cliff. Had I not quit my day job without a contingency plan, I doubt that I would have had the courage to try being a working artist for a living – and yet, here I am. It's one of those golden times where a hasty decision was in fact absolutely for the best, but there was no way that I could have known that when I left my job.

I wish that I could tell some fantastic story of having a great idea to reinvent the wheel... but the truth is far more obscure than that. I really started out by just working on what I loved and was lucky enough to make some good networking connections that provided an excellent outlet for my screenprinting. From there, I suppose more than anything it was having the support and help of my lovely husband and my studio, AIR.


How did you choose the name for your business?
Honestly? It's another less-than-glamorous-tale. Before I started screenprinting, I had been lurking on a poster/screenprinting website forum called gigposters.com and wanted to make a post, which entailed having to come up with a screen name. I believe that I stared at the wall for a moment, just string words together that sounded nice, fresh, perhaps searching for a compound word made of things that I like. Believe it or not, Chocolatepuppykisses didn't quite roll off the tongue so well and strawberryluna just kind of ended up being the happenstance choice at that moment, well before I had aspirations to start my business. Once I did sort of have to start taking my design more seriously and come up with a name for my studio and art work, I didn't feel comfortable using my real name. I figured that "strawberryluna" was feminine and open to interpretation and as good as anything else that I might come up with so I went with that. I feel like this whole interview reveals me to be a bit of a random goofball. Well, that is a fair assessment of my character, what can I do? Hee.


What do you love most about creating your work?
I love getting the chance to try new imagery and techniques. I feel as though I learn something new nearly every time that I work on a new project or print.

What's the most fascinating place you've been?
Paris, no contest. We got to go there in late 2001 for about a week. I love the ocean and am always fascinated by any seaside places that I go, but Paris was absolutely amazing every single moment that we were there, I'm sure not speaking excellent, but getting to practice my high school French was a part of that. Being surrounded by an culture much older and so richly in love with history and art was incredible.


A book you love:
One! Yipes! Can I mention two? We Have Always Lived In The Castle, by Shirley Jackson and The Master And Margarita, by Mikail Bulgakov. Both have these constantly wavering levels of beauty and creepiness that leave you unsure about the relative innocence of the main character that is like following a quiet wooded path as twilight falls.


What is the most interesting thing about you?
Perhaps that I have never had nor been able to fully comprehend something like a 5-year-plan, but seem to find my way into good situations regardless. In fact, the 5-year-plan types of questions confuse and minorly stress me out because not only is it difficult for me to form one that feels right, I also know that my life had never gone forward in ways that I could have predicted. I'm a big proponent of meandering whenever possible.

What achievement are you most proud of?
Being self-taught.


What advice would you give women starting their own business?
Definitely stay with your guts. If you are interested in and passionate about what you do, then stick with it. Networking is something that is so important for any business to succeed and I think that women have a natural aptitude for it, in that we are raised to be so social and interact with the people around us. But we often don't fully realize that not only is it a social grace but also an important business tool.


What's the biggest challenge you face in your work?
Meeting deadlines! In some ways it's the hardest part of my job, scheduling time for design and printing 1-2 times a week at my shared space studio, as well as answering emails and sending out any orders that I have. However, one of the great things about making posters is that the work is very time-sensitive and a piece has to be done and gone by a certain, hard date. So in a way, that's very freeing to me as I don't have the luxury/albatross of working endlessly on a piece as I might if I were a painter. If that were the case, I'd probably finish one piece a year!


What do you love to do in your free time?
Spend time with my husband and friends, giggle as much as possible and just get out of my head. I work alone and from home and sometimes that can make me a little stir-crazy so it's so refreshing to just spend time with friends and laugh.


What are you working on right now?
Other than this interview, I am very close to finishing a project that I started close to two years ago when one of my best friends wanted to have a few prints for her newborn daughter's bedroom. That was the beginning of my alphabet series, which at the time, I have to admit, 26 separate designs and prints didn't really seem like a lot. Oh, but it is! I have three left to complete in the next two weeks and I can't wait to the series all done and ready.

What do you hope to achieve next?
I'm really excited to get working on some art prints and I'd like to try and do some textile designs in the coming year. We'll see!