Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Laura Hollingsworth. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Laura, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

The advice I give newer artists is to practice as much as you can and do studies. Drawing at all will help you grow, though using reference and working in realism will help you improve the most efficiently. Getting a good grasp on the fundamentals might be tedious, daunting, and boring compared to creating in your own style from imagination, but the effort is worth it. Creating from imagination comes more easily and my cartoony art style is more solid because I built a foundation on realism.

Laura, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a full-time freelance illustrator. I mainly create artwork for authors, such as book covers and promotional character art.

In 2009, I launched a fantasy webcomic called The Silver Eye (which I still create today!). To successfully tell the story, I had to learn to draw a wide range of subjects. I was putting in over thirty hours of work every week to regularly upload new pages. My artistic skills developed quickly as a result. Within two years, enough people were asking if I took commissions that I started working commercially. I’ve had a steady stream of clients ever since, purely through word-of-mouth and posting art on social media.

I’ve done a variety of projects, but my favorites are always working with fellow storytellers and capturing their creations through visual art. Whether I’m making fanart or commissions, I’m very devoted to portraying what the creator of the work had in mind. Some readers’ eyes glaze over when they get to J. R. R. Tolkien’s descriptions of settings, but I eat that stuff up and take copious notes so I can make my illustrations as accurate as possible. I was overjoyed when I read the acknowledgments in Keeper of the Lost Cities: Unlocked where Shannon Messenger says I captured her characters, “… so perfectly that sometimes I wonder if you peeked inside my brain. (You’re not a Telepath, are you???)” because that’s the ultimate goal when working with authors.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I attribute my ability to draw to The Silver Eye webcomic, but my motivation to draw came a few years before that.

When I was thirteen, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. The high blood sugars before I was diagnosed were very rough on me physically, and one of the results was that I rapidly developed cataracts. I made the mistake of trying to pretend nothing was wrong for as long as I could. Colors turned into sepia tone. My friends and family faded into shadowy silhouettes. Seeing things at a distance was out of the question, I would walk behind people so that I could watch the blurry shapes of their feet and not trip over things.

I knew the level of vision loss was bad, but I didn’t realize just how bad until I finally had surgery to replace my lenses with synthetic ones. Everything had diminished so gradually, and the sudden reintroduction of detail, color, and clarity was shocking.

That’s when I started observing things more closely. It awoke a yearning to absorb the beauty of Creation and reflect it back out into the world because that helps me understand and appreciate beauty more fully. Even my work from imagination has a lot of influence from reality. When you’re drawing a subject and breaking it down into fundamental shapes, values, colors, ect.—that’s when you truly see it. The cataracts were a wake-up call that sight is temporary—as well as every other part of the body that helps me make this form of artwork. Scar tissue still impedes my vision from time to time and it’s a reminder to not take anything for granted.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

When a visual storyteller is trying to grow a following on social media, it’s difficult to get seen without chasing trends and changing what you create to appeal to wider audiences. I’ve found a solid networking strategy where I’ll switch between original content and fanart for stories with a similar audience, but it needs to be balanced.

If you set up an account and only post original content on it, that’s kind of like chucking it into the void of the internet where even people who would love it probably aren’t going to see it. On the other hand, if you post fanart, you’ll get way more interaction and presence in the algorithms. That affirmation can be highly addictive, give you a false sense of popularity, and you can end up with a following that only cares for your derivative content but could not care less about your original work. I fell into that when I was younger and made tons of fanart that doesn’t have great meaning to me now.

Today I’m better at ignoring numbers and sharing things that feel like me. I’ll post the plein-air sketches that make me happy, even though they get a fraction of the interaction my digital work gets. I’ll post original art, even though it gets nowhere near the reach of fanart. I will post fanart, too, but I’m more selective about what series it’s for. Previously I did fanart for things that I enjoyed in passing, but now I prefer to stick with timeless stories I feel an authentic connection to.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://laurahollingsworth.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laura.hollingsworth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LauraHollingsworthArt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drawingsworth
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDsLRSCNQ0hGLz_RbCDwpEw
• Other: https://thesilvereye.com/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheSilverEyeShop

Image Credits
Laura Hollingsworth