We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bridgett Hancock. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bridgett below.

Bridgett, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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.

My learning process started the moment I could pick up a crayon. For as long as I can remember I’ve been drawing, and always wanting to get better. In school, I took art classes and once I was old enough to have a phone, I watched art tutorial videos on YouTube. It’s crazy how many new skills you can pick up just from watching videos. My advice to anyone who’s wanting to learn to draw is to ashore info from other artists as often as possible. This was easiest for me in college, where I was surrounded by dedicated artists and professors who all supported each other in their art careers. On top of this, ALWAYS keep drawing. The worst thing you can do is stop or give up because you feel like what you’re making isn’t good enough. I can think of times where I took breaks from art because I was discouraged, but if I would have powered through I would have improved at a faster rate.

Bridgett, 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?

My name is Bridgett Hancock, aka Lady Bridgett. I’m a Cincinnati based artist who focuses mostly does illustration, but dips back into fine art when I really want to express something. A lot of my work has themes of queer representation (mostly lesbian relationships) and mental health. I graduated from Northern Kentucky University with a BFA in drawing, and my preferred mediums are digital art, charcoal, and oil paints.

I’m currently providing commissioned art, and take a lot of pride and joy in people’s reaction to the finished pieces! I work really hard to make sure my art goes above and beyond their expectations. Often, my art is commissioned as a gift for a loved one, so as I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a lot of pressure to draw something up not only to the commissioner’s standard, but also that the receiver enjoys. But that just makes the final reaction even more satisfying at the end of the day.

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

The best thing society can do right now to support artists is to completely reject the AI bandwagon. It’s stealing away our jobs, our social media spaces, and a lot of artist’s hope for the future. A lot of people think AI is just harmless fun that gives you instant images or text, without realizing that it’s stealing from the art that was used to train the systems. Companies see it as a cheaper and easier alternative to hiring real artists, thus causing a lack of jobs for artists to take. The only thing that can be done to keep it from taking over the artist space is to NOT interact with it. That means no making Ai images, playing with AI filters, using programs like ChatGBT to write things for you, anything that is Ai generated needs to be completely avoided so that the trend dies out. And if you see companies using it, complain about it! Tell them that this is not okay, and avoid buying their products until they too drop the Ai trend.

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

The main mission of my creative journey is to help queer people see themselves in media. As a lesbian growing up in the Midwest, I had no queer representation and countless people telling me that those people were “evil” and “disgusting.” Thus, I repressed those feelings and tried to hide who I was. Luckily in high school, I saw a lesbian character in a cartoon for the first time in my life. It completely blew my mind that a queer character could be depicted so beautifully and lovingly, that it helped set me on the path of being comfortable and happy with my own sexuality. Thus, I decided that I wanted my art to have the same affect on people, where they could see lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and other identities and know they aren’t a alone and have positive representations of themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ladybridgettart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lady.bridgett.draws?igsh=MW45bWk2cTR5dnVlaQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Other: Etsy- https://ladybridgettart.etsy.com/