We were lucky to catch up with Danielle Soliday recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Danielle, thanks for 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.

Painting has always been something that I have enjoyed and I learned by actually painting. I discovered what I liked painting and worked on how I could get better, usually I would look at photography and videos that other artists have posted to try different techniques. For actually sealing the tags to make them wearable I asked around to other shops to see what worked for them, and most didn’t mind answering my questions! I think being okay with having things not turn out is important to be okay with, since creating things is a lot of successes and failures. I think the biggest obstacle toward learning is time, I have a lot of ideas for designs with different techniques. However, with everything else that goes into a business and in life sometimes its hard to sit down and work on new techniques.

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?

Hello! My name is Danielle and I hand paint dog tags, crate tags, and coasters for your home. I have always had a love for painting, even when I was younger. However, I stopped when I went off to college since I didn’t have the space to keep supplies. Since being back in my hometown and after the stress of my first semester of graduate school, I started looking for ways to get my mind away from my schoolwork. When I made some tags for my own dogs, I found that painting helps relieve some of the stress. I got lots of support and interest in my tags after showing them to friends so I decided to open up a shop to share my art with others. I am proud that I have created a tag that can hold up on your dog throughout life adventures. I know that I take my own dogs with me wherever I go and I wanted to make sure that if they were lost they had something on them that I could be contacted with, but also I wanted them to be beautiful and reflect your life, hobbies, or favorite places.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal was to make beautiful art your dog can wear that reflects the things you love in life, hobbies, or favorite places. I also wanted to make sure that they were functional, we all know dogs like to roll, run, swim, tear through bushes, dig in various spots, play with each other. So my goal was to make sure that they would hold up throughout all the wear and tear in your dogs life so they can be found if they are ever lost.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Slowly! Figure out who you want your audience to be, and what platforms you wanna work with. Make sure you are clear with what you make or do to your audience. I follow a lot of influencers that share how they grow and that can help a lot. Also figure out what drives the social media you are using, like right now for instagram reels are huge! Then share! Share your work, the process of how its made, etc.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://beacons.ai/themidwestpaints/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themidwest_paints/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/themidwestpaints
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/midwest_paints

Image Credits
@theabqmutts @champagne.layla @themidwest_goldens @themidwesthounds @fluffsontheroad