We were lucky to catch up with Kelli Cox recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kelli, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

There is no one particular project that I’ve worked on that I would label as the most meaningful. Instead, I’ve created an entire genre of portraits that I know are a part of my life’s purpose.

When I started trying to make money off of my art, I didn’t have any sort of direction. I would complete cute, but vague pieces like what you pick up in the home décor section of Hobby Lobby. I was just praying that people would spend money on my small business instead of a big corporation. However, no amount of prayer was making me successful in this area. I knew I needed to find my niche, but lacked confidence in my skill.

Until a couple years ago. A friend of mine reached out and asked if I would complete a family portrait for her to give as a Christmas gift. She sent me a few reference photos from Pinterest of faceless families and cute little doodle families. I had a lot of the same things saved to my account, but I’d never taken the leap to complete one. I was afraid people would rather order from a more experienced artist. There were a lot of really negative and paralyzing “what ifs” running through my head.

Agreeing to that first portrait absolutely changed my life. Looking back at it, I can tell I didn’t quite have a style or method down, but it was what I needed to get started in the right direction. After that, I started doing a lot more research. What were other people charging for something like this? What mediums were they using? What was their subject matter? I also started taking orders and completing portraits as gifts to get the word out to more people.

At around the one year mark, I had an extra special project sitting in the back of my mind. I’d seen portraits like mine completed for infancy loss awareness. The portraits were based on a family photo with Jesus standing off to the side holding a baby. I knew I wanted to try one of these portraits, but I didn’t know where to begin finding a family to gift one to. I knew the statistics of miscarriages and other birthing complications that left families so heart broken, but people tend to grieve silently about these things.

Then my sister-in-law’s oldest sister made a Facebook post celebrating the birth of her first baby from years earlier. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive for very long and his short, but sweet life left a big hole in the hearts of his family members. I knew if I was going to do this it had to be for them. So, one day I approached my sister-in-law about completing a painting as a gift for her to give to her sister. I showed her the idea and she burst into tears. Not the reaction I was hoping for and exactly why I didn’t reach out directly to her sister. I have no idea how people cope with losing something as precious as a child. Even through tears, she whole heartedly agreed that her sister’s family needed that portrait in their home.

I cried through the entire thing.

Once the painting was done and shared by both my self and the family more orders started rolling in. Many of them have been infancy loss paintings, but most people ask me to create portraits with any lost child or loved one. I’ve completed portraits of teenagers, grandparents, and spouses. It’s become my specialty to pieces together three or four family portraits to give people a piece of lost time and memories. I know these paintings make a big difference in lives of the people receiving them. I still cry for every single one, but my heart is so full.

Kelli, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Kelli Ellie and I am an artist and aspiring author.

I’ve always been interested in art and writing, but growing up I never really considered myself good at either. It was just second nature for me to keep coming back to it. At a certain point I stopped telling my self that I wasn’t good at it and started telling my self I was going to learn to be good at it. People look at my work and think I have some kind of hidden talent for it. Really, my only secret is that I worked at it. I loved it enough to put time and effort into learning it.

Over the last couple of year, my business has been creating portraits out of watercolor and fine liner. I take custom orders for bridal portraits, couples, families, and pets. I also piece together multiple pictures to create portraits that reunite families with lost loved ones. My clients often come to me worried they are asking too much or afraid they don’t have the correct reference material to make it work. We always work together to figure out the best way to include everyone they want in the portrait and even dress them in their signature outfits.

For me it all goes back to loving what I do and having a heart for people. I never dreamed that my art would be anything significant. Now it helps families heal and even celebrate. That’s so much more than I could have ever asked for.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I’ve recently changed day jobs. I went from teaching 2nd grade to middle school art and theatre. Something that I have been extremely passionate about is showing my students the wide variety of art/ creative based jobs out there. I grew up in small rural town with very little support for art in our school. My junior and senior year in high school was when I started to really wonder if I could do something creative with my life. I got a lot of push back from adults and even my peers. The phrase “starving artist” was thrown around a lot. I thought in order to be a successful artist, I would have to take a design job in a big city. Which for a girl who grew up in a town with 1 and 1/2 traffic lights that was a terrifying thought. I ended up settling for education and thus began the rest of my life.

My wish is that people had been more supportive in helping me find careers that are art focused. I wish someone had sat down with me and done some research. We would have found that there are a lot of creative based jobs out there that I would have been a great fit for and none of them would have involved me starving for my art.

I also want people to understand that art and creativity is wired into my soul. I may have been discouraged from following my dreams for awhile, but I was constantly looking for my favorite medium and forming my style. I couldn’t even count the amount of creative hobbies I collected just to figure out what fit me best.

Settling for education was a stepping stone to where I am today. With out it I wouldn’t have met the person who inspired my portraits. However, it has also weakened my desire and ability to do art. When you’re giving all your time and energy to a job like teaching there isn’t a lot left over to sit down and paint. I fought through it through and am finally living my dream.

There is a way to support the creatives in your life. We need your logic and understanding of the world to set us on the right path, but remember there is a way for us to be happy and secure at the same time.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Shop small. Shop small! I would scream it from the roof tops if I thought it would reach more people. I get it. Amazon is super convenient and I am frequent flyer of the site myself. However, whenever you can, find someone local or order directly from an artist.

Modern society is so weird. In a lot of ways I feel like they’ve made it possible for many artists to live their dreams and in other ways its totally squashing us. For example, I use TikTok to advertise my portraits and build a following just like many other artists these days. However, one of the most popular trends right now is to us AIs to “create” art. AIs are stealing the work of real artists and marketing it as their own. We’re getting over looked by the algorithm for a machine that is stealing from us. Make it make sense!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @kelliellieart
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kelliellieart
• Other: TikTok: @kelliellie Author Page: www.facebook.com/AuthorKelliElizabethCox Etsy: @kelliellie