We asked some insanely talented artists, creatives and makers to tell us about when they know they were going to pursue a creative career.

Tattiana Smith

I have always been a creative person. However, I never really thought about pursuing a creative career until I became an adult. I remember wanting to be a lawyer at one point and a chef at another. Once I got older, I ditched those aspirations and didn’t really know where I would land. I started to explore makeup as a medium of expression when I was in college. I cut my hair in my second year and used makeup as a way for me to feel comfortable and more feminine. In 2016, I eventually got a job at a makeup retailer but I still wasn’t at the point of pursing makeup artistry as a career option. I was more so focused on finishing school. Read more>>

Raven Wright

Ever since I became self-aware, I’ve been captivated by fashion. As a child, I spent countless hours sketching garments and dreaming of a future in the industry. In 8th grade, I had an incredible art teacher who encouraged our creativity. She allowed us to work on whatever inspired us, and naturally, my focus was always fashion. Noticing my passion, she brought in a Vogue magazine for the class. It was love at first sight. Turning each page filled me with excitement and joy. Read more>>

Lono Bristol

We knew we wanted to throw events a long time ago. We’ve traveled to different countries together and we would drunkenly tell each other how we could throw big events of our own. One day we all sat together (Lono Bristol, Isi David, Kevin Utti and Dillon Griffith) and decided we would throw and official event under the name “close friends only” We used a rooftop of a friend we knew and had a great turnout. Read more>>

Georgie Rickard

I have always been involved in music since I was a young child. My father plays drums in local classic rock bands as well as owns a local recording studio, and my mother plays piano and saxophone, so I was destined to learn at least one instrument. I started taking piano lessons at 5 years old and, later, became enamored with learning more instruments, including violin and clarinet. I found that out of all subjects, music just came the most naturally to me. That is how I knew I wanted to make music a life long career! Read more>>

Susan Falck

As a teenager, I knew I was artistic and I had a deep desire to create. I participated in Art classes and contributed to school projects with pen and ink drawings. As a 30 year old young wife and mom of 3, we didn’t have much money for extras like Art supplies. I was always gathering wild materials to weave into baskets. My 10 year old son and I would go on walks in the forest looking for wild Honeysuckle vines and exposed roots of Cedar trees. Red Ozier Dogwood and willows in Spring wove into beautiful colorful twig baskets. Read more>>

Paz Morales

I remember the exact moment I knew I wanted to pursue a creative path professionally. I was sitting at my mom’s desk, surrounded by the tools of her craft—leather scraps, old jeans, sewing machines working in the background, measuring tapes draped over dress forms. The particular smell of leather , and the sounds of the sewing machines felt like music to my curious, creative mini-self. Read more>>

Joseph Reese

I’ve always been surrounded by creativity, whether it was music playing in the house or moments where I could lose myself in discovering new songs, writing, or singing. But the moment I truly knew I wanted to pursue a creative path professionally was during grade school. That was when I began to explore music in a more academic way, learning its foundations and realizing its depth. Being exposed to individuals who had built their lives around music sparked something in me—it showed me that this passion could be more than just a hobby; it could be a career. Read more>>

Cem Ertunc

The first time I realized I wanted to pursue a creative path wasn’t one of those cinematic “lightbulb moments” you’d expect. I didn’t grow up running around with a toy camera in hand or dreaming about making films since I was a kid. I was born in Turkey, and while I always had this restless urge to create something, I didn’t quite know what that “something” was for a long time. Read more>>

Nemanja Petrovic

I had always been interested in art as I was always drawing but really never knew it could even be a career in any way. In around 2011, Instagram had taken off and I started to come across all these different artists that I never knew existed. It really was a snowball effect as I was introduced to an artist and then that led me to another and so on. My horizons had been greatly expanded in that moment due to social media. Read more>>

Noelia Sevillano

When I was a kid I was the kind of girl who like a lot to draw, it’s something always have been with me.

In highschool I realized that I wanted to learn more about art and illustration and not to studie something I didn’t want for my future, but I didn’t have any idea for where could I started, so one of my best friends helped me to find an art school near my city. At that time I felt so small compared to my favorite artists but with time and dedication I went to my first Artist Alley. Read more>>

Jim Newton

I always loved singing, learning to play the guitar and performing in folk groups but, until I had the opportunity to sing with and for hospitalized children in 1983 at Columbus Children’s Hospital (now Nationwide Children’s in Columbus, OH)., I had not found my lifetime career path. After singing with a group of children gathered in a waiting area at the hospital, I was invited by a nurse to sing for a terminally ill little boy and his mom in a room down the hall. When the nurse introduced me to “Toby” (not his real name), she said – “This is Jim, he plays the guitar and sings and is going to make you feel better.” Read more>>

Aubrey Fournier

Making balloon animals was never on my radar. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to dramatically switch careers from being a behavior analyst with an M.Ed. to twisting balloons for children’s events. However, I am so glad that I did! As an artist, it is freeing when you take a risk and pursue your creative spark. I decided to make a career change after my, then, three-year-old daughter asked for balloon animals for her birthday party. I brushed off her request for a week, and told her she was too young. To my dismay, she persisted to fixate on her request for balloon animals and every time she saw a delivery truck come down the street she would say, “Mom, my balloons are here!” Read more>>

Allison Ivy

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t wanting to pursue a creative path. I started out wanting to be a musician, and that evolved into songwriting. Then, my desired path became that of an author. In elementary school, I discovered Goosebumps and read one of them a day. I was the kid who would read during lunch and study hall. As I got older, I would read Fear Street and Point Horror books from authors like Christopher Pike and Diane Hoh. I took creative writing classes in high school and college, dreaming about the day I could publish my own stories. Read more>>

Daniel Forster

From an early age, I felt drawn to creativity, but for many years it remained just a whisper in the back of my mind. Life had steered me along a different path – I spent years in IT consulting, focused on the corporate world. But that creative drive never really went away. Read more>>

I always knew I wanted to be an artist. A specific memory I have where I thought “I could be an artist” is from when I was a child. I was watching a VHS tape of my favorite animated film with my mother. I’d always want to skip to the end because there was a segment showing behind-the-scenes clips of the animators working on the film. My mother leaned over and said, “That could be you someday”. This gave me the inspiration I needed to really jumpstart my interest in art and later set my goals of having an art career. I created my characters and stories of distant lands, filling up sketchbook pages and dreaming of the day I would become an established artist. Read more>>

Hana Lock

I loved to draw for as long as I could hold a pen, and growing up, my family, teachers, and peers knew me as the artsy kid. I was always quietly doodling cute cartoon animals and comics in the margins of my assignments during class and in my sketchbook during recess and lunch. I don’t know why I loved art or what compelled me to draw in the first place; it was just a natural part of me. However, it wasn’t until I was 14 that I realized that I wanted to pursue art beyond that as a hobby and instead as a legitimate career path. Read more>>

Keirra Ewah

Thanks for having me! I’m a storyteller whose voice is shaped by both my African American and Nigerian heritage. Having parents from two different worlds gave me a unique perspective on life and, by extension, on storytelling. But my creative journey didn’t begin in a studio or on a film set. It all started when I was just three years old, captivated by the distinct baby sound that Timbaland used in Aaliyah’s song “Are You That Somebody”—according to my mom, that’s where it began. Read more>>

Stephanie Hainer

I have always been into arts and crafts for a lack of better term. I’d wake up early on weekend mornings and craft while watching cartoons before everyone woke up. In high school I packed as many art classes as I could into my schedule. In college I was taking a range of art classes to help pinpoint how I could incorporate art into making a living, but it never really seemed attainable. The norm was to have a 4 year career followed by a desk job with benefits. Year 2 of my college journey, my mom passed away after a long fight with cancer. I had totally lost myself during this time. I came home from college to manage life, and ended up getting into real estate. Read more>>

Day Shaw

The first time I knew I wanted to pursue a creative path professionally in fashion was when I moved to Chicago. The city was a melting pot of different styles and cultures, and I was blown away by how fashion could tell so many unique stories. It was in that environment that I realized fashion wasn’t just about clothing—it was a way to express identity, creativity, and culture. Read more>>

Kevin Billets

It really all started when I was 7 years old! I began taking private piano lessons as a little boy, not knowing where music would take me. Fast forward 4 years, I was apart of my middle school band…which then led to me being apart of my high school band. Throughout my younger years, I would take annual music exams, a lot of which consisted of classical music/music theory. It was challenging- being so young and having to devote hours and hours a week to something that at the time, I did not value as much as I do today. I would spend about an hour a day going over the same scales! the same songs! It taught me to be disciplined. It showed me that with enough consistency, one can achieve anything we put our mind too. Read more>>

Ryan Heimbach

In 2011, just a year after I had started learning to sculpt I created a series of sculptures called “Hands of Times”. With that series I applied to The Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach. That year I was the youngest artist to be accepted (22 yrs old) and it was then I knew I wanted to create art professionally. Read more>>

Zeynep Bihter Yildiz

Let’s go back to my childhood. Drawing on walls when I was little, doodling on desks in high school and being able to say “yes, this is my thing” in college. Drawing was always something I had in me. But after graduating, I listened to others say “you should do this, there’s money in this, focus on this field” etc. and I got fed up with it. I didn’t really do what they said either. I was looking for my own path. Then I decided to let my “childish” side shine: I focused on children’s literature! It was a field that always interested me and this time I realized that I wanted to be someone in that field. So I wrote and drew my first book. Read more>>

Dtrap

Hi, I’m Deep Chakraborty, but most people know me as dtrap. I’m a 26-year-old music producer and sample maker from India, working hard to carve my space in the Hollywood music industry. My journey into music started in high school when I became a huge fan of Eminem. Back then, I didn’t have much—a small Android phone and the Groove Mixer app—but I made it work. Those early experiments taught me a lot about creativity and persistence. Read more>>

Paige Byrd

I remember the day quite well. I don’t know exactly what day it was – as in I couldn’t give you an exact date. But I was 15 years old, laying in my bunk bed in my bedroom in Pierce City, MO in a house off Myrtle St. I was probably grounded, I was grounded a lot in those days. But I was laying in bed looking up at the top bunk and remember thinking to myself “this is it. I know for sure that making music is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I know I want to pursue it hard and make a career out of it. I want to be a successful musician who makes a living just off of my music.” Read more>>

Ella Stichler

I’ve always known that the corporate world or a desk job was never my calling. I always just felt that I was meant for something different, something more fulfilling. Finding my way to this realization, however, took time and self-discovery.

My creative journey began at the age of three when I started performing. It always came natural to me, and it wasn’t just something I did; it was something that got me out of bed every single day. Whether I was dancing in recitals, singing in musicals or at church, or simply entertaining family and friends during the holidays, I always felt at home when I was performing. Even as a child, my imagination ran wild—I would gather my friends after school to shoot little movies with our iPods or create elaborate, make-believe games that transformed our neighborhood into a stage. Read more>>

Jace Dakotah

I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I knew I wanted to pursue a creative path. It wasn’t a singular lightbulb moment, more like a series of flickering candles lighting the way. But if I had to trace it back, it started somewhere between the chaos of my childhood and the quiet moments when I escaped into my own imagination. Growing up, love was always present, but stability wasn’t. My parents’ relationship was a pendulum swinging back and forth, and I was often caught in the middle, an outcast sibling with a different father, always feeling like I didn’t belong in the picture others had painted for me. Read more>>

Jackson Gray

Originally, I wanted to be a comedian, and although I can be pretty funny, I realized I didn’t want to be funny ALL the time. Then I realized I just wanted to be an actor, but I eventually fell in love with the entire filmmaking process rather than just the acting part- which led me to picking up a camera in the first place. I quickly learned I enjoyed taking pictures as much as I enjoyed cinematography. Read more>>