We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bruce Brenneise a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Bruce, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I’ve been making a full-time living as an artist since late 2018. It’s been a long journey: it took me about twelve years from college graduation to that point, with plenty of twists and turns. It could easily take much less time than that, however.

That’s the first point I’d like to make, actually. That it can be a long process; that it’s different for each person; that you shouldn’t feel ashamed if your path looks different from others or takes longer. Just know what your long term plan is and be flexible about living your best life as an artist. I’m proud of my decisions, even the ones that had nothing to do with a creative career.

In my case, upon graduation, I didn’t see a clear path to the career I wanted as an artist. So, I scratched another itch, moving to China for six years to live as an expat. I taught, wrote, explored, tried a variety of things (a start-up magazine, voice acting, etc). Then I returned to art with skills that could tide me over and give me a longer runway from which to launch my art career. There is no shame in having a day job, or a part-time day job, as you bring your dreams to fruition. Everything can be part of your strategy, a five year plan or ten year plan, etc.

My second point (which can potentially greatly speed up the process) is the importance of networking. When I was finally ready to apply for professional art jobs, for a whole year I was applying for every position or freelance gig I could find. And yet I didn’t hear back from any but the very worst ones in terms of pay and treatment. Even with hindsight and better skills now, I know I was producing work good enough to get some of those jobs. What was the problem? The problem it turns out is that no one knew who I was. My social media bubble was just friends/family. I didn’t have any connections to peers in the industry. By the end of that year I decided I’d invest my time and money in becoming ubiquitous at art events and getting to know (and be known) by as many peers as I could. Conversations led to artists passing on work that they either didn’t have time for or that wasn’t in their wheelhouse. Art directors saw me as a human being, not a random name in an email petitioning them for work… as well as kind, helpful behavior in person that made them more likely to want to work with me. Lo and behold, the jobs started coming in. A creative career isn’t just built on art skills, but also social skills. Many shy or socially anxious artists resist this lesson because it can be hard (and I’m one of them), but if anything can turbo charge one’s career, it’s this.

My third point I’d like to cover is the importance of multiple income streams, particularly independent ones that don’t rely on any particular client’s approval. At that point in my career I was starting to get steady (but often underpaid) freelance work. It was sustainable only with a part-time day job. Then I started looking into things like Kickstarter, Patreon, and most importantly, conventions. That’s a whole other area of skills to develop (salesmanship, marketing, project self-management), but these were the things that finally allowed me to cut loose my last vestiges of a day job. There were far fewer gatekeepers (sometime none), so expanding these income streams was something I had relatively much more control over. Even if (at first) the amounts weren’t huge, I could also control how often I did events, sales, etc to bring in enough money to keep going. Moreover, several times already, as the world is buffeted by events beyond our control (pandemics, art trends, AI), it’s proven incredibly useful to be able to pivot from one income source to another. Rather than pin all one’s hopes on a particular company or method of making money, build a resilient career that can allow you to do what you love and weather some serious setbacks.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an award-winning illustrator and concept artist. What I love doing is worldbuilding through landscapes, particularly otherworldly, alien, or weird ones. I’m best known for my work on games such as Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Numenera, and Slay the Spire. I help to create or build up worlds for clients such as those, and I also like to create my own worlds via my Patreon and eventual Kickstarter projects. I exhibit and sell my work as prints and lifestyle products at a variety of conventions such as Gen Con, Dragon Con, Emerald City Comic Con, and many others, and it is also on my own website. I like to think that my work allows people to step out of this world and into my imagination (and their own) for a while.

Some notable problems I’ve solved for clients include: 1) a book cover for D&D involving the relaunch of a classic setting (Spelljammer) that involved complex perspective issues and a weird combination of space and oceanic environment. 2) I created the backgrounds and environments for hit indie game, Slay the Spire. While there was some basic concept art I was working with, the development and realization of the setting was largely up to me. 3) I was brought in to create a lot of weird landscapes for Numenera, Monte Cook Games gave me carte blanche to pretty much create whatever I wanted, so really my work became both concept art and finished illustrations of places that had never previously been described before. They were incredibly pleased with the results, built whole chapters of game design off of it, and many fans of the setting have told me that my work helped draw them into it.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Not so much that I wish I’d known about, but resources that literally didn’t exist when I began my creative journey. Blogs such as ‘Muddy Colors’ and ‘Gurney Journey’ came into being sometime around 2010. Related workshops such as Illustration Master Class, online schooling like CGMA, Schoolism, and Proko, and myriad online tutorials. These were the missing ingredient when I graduated from college. They’ve set out enough information that I was able to figure out the steps I needed to take for my particular journey into a creative career.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The pandemic is the big pivot a lot of small businesses have faced. Heading into 2020, I’d just had a successful year of twelve conventions and was looking for that to continue to grow my income, much more than freelance. I had fourteen conventions on my 2020 dance card, but I knew there was a possibility this wasn’t going to work out. My family had just had to cancel a trip to visit relatives in China over Jan/Feb for Chinese New Year because of the virus rapidly exploding there. I managed to get one convention here before the pandemic hit, and the rest of my events for the year were canceled.

Thankfully, I hadn’t built my business around just conventions (as a number of my peers had). I was immediately able to leverage freelance work I had done for a popular indie game to run a couple big online sales of related merch, easily raising as much money as I could have at several of my largest conventions (without most of the associated costs). Because I’d kept my foot in the world of freelance, I was also able to fully pivot into freelance (entirely work from home) income with several of my largest clients to date getting in contact with me around that time. As a result, in 2020 my business income didn’t fall, but nearly doubled (and then nearly doubled again in 2021 when I was able to add some conventions back into the mix).

Contact Info:

• Website: www.brucebrenneise.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brucebrenneise/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/bbrennworks/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-brenneise-8b2a9336/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Brucedraws
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/brucebrenneise