We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elisabeth Larson Koehler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Elisabeth thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I am fortunate to be able to earn my full time income from a website/ blog I created. It initially started with a very simple wordpress site I set up and filled with painting tutorials and tips. As an artist, my goal was to to create an income source that was not dependent on the sale of my own work, but a business that still allowed me to use my work in a secondary way. This freed me to create paintings that aligned with my vision, without the pressure of commissions. Through Pinterest the website started to gain traction and received some serious traffic. Creating this new blog just so happened to coincide with Covid lockdowns. And the company my husband worked for let all their contractors go due to the shift covid brought.

My husband and I then decided to join forces as the blog was showing potential. As a web developer he was able to strengthen the website much more and focus his attention on the marketing aspect of our business. Several months later we received our first income source from a well respected ad network agency – who we still work with today. At this point our traffic was at about 50K pageviews per month and garnering genuine interest in our teaching material. I then filmed and created our very first painting course that we released to our e-mail list. This first launch was successful and a pivotal moment for me to see that this model works as we received real clients and students – many of whom are still with us today. Through the years I have built multiple courses and created an ebook and have had the joy of getting to work with artists from all around the world.

Though we are able to earn our living from our business, it is still a work in progress. If I could do one thing differently it would be to work on getting our courses into funnels faster and better. This is a focus for us going forward. I am also working on putting more attention to social media as another way to build our audience.

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?

My interest in my craft first started as a child and being exposed to art and painting and drawing materials in my school. My favorite activity was to draw, which I would do all the time at home. However, I never really learned the fundamentals of drawing or painting until I enrolled in the painting and drawing program at the University of Washington. This was the true beginning of learning my craft. A whole new world and way of seeing opened up to me which kindled my love for painting in a much deeper way. It was a real revelation to understand how one can create light in a painting and how shapes of values give form and dimension.

This learning and understanding was further deepened when I attended a small painting school abroad. I learned how to see very abstractly and break down “things” into spots of color. It is precisely this that is a hallmark in my work. My focus is to create a type of visual poetry and show the extraordinary ways in which colors and values relate to one another. We often miss the rich beauty that is all around us, but painting is able to clearly show that which our eyes are most blind to.

It is this way of seeing and thinking that I bring to my courses and teaching material as well. As it is at the core of what painting is and based in the traditions of painters from the past.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a painter is getting to continually engage with my craft and grow as an artist. A very frustrating aspect of painting but also one of the most wonderful is that it offers boundless learning opportunities – the lessons it teaches you never stop. I also greatly enjoy how my life as a painter enriches every other area of life. The hobbies I engage with and relationships I have with people are highly influenced by my practice.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I actually have not focused at all on building my audience on social media. Rather I focused on building an e-mail list first. And want to take this opportunity to point out the importance of having an e-mail list – something that is often overlooked. With social media you unfortunately don’t have control over whether your audience sees your content or not. You also don’t have control if your account getting flagged or deleted entirely. This is a real situation that sometimes happens to people that publish the most innocent content that should never cause any censorship violations. This is not to cause fear, I think social media is very important and you should definitely put focus and effort into it. However, I think it is also very important to simultaneously work on building an e-mail list. With it you will be able to create much greater security for yourself and reach more people.

My e-mail subscriber list is around 35K and it is from my e-mail list alone that have been able to sell courses. As an incentive to get people to join my e-mail list, I offer a freebie. It is from this one free offering alone that I was able to build my list from 0 to where it is at today. It is important to figure out what kind of information will resonate with your audience and create a small digital file from that. You don’t want it to be too long, but just enough to deliver value and make your new subscribers wanting to learn more from you.

From there it is important to keep in touch with your e-mail list at least once a week and deliver valuable content and information. This will build trust between you and your audience over time. Those that resonate with what you do will be eager to support you and your work.

Contact Info:

• Website: ArtStudioLife.com
• Instagram: elisabeth_larson
• Facebook: Facebook.com/artstudiolifecommunity
• Linkedin: Elisabeth Larson Koehler
• Youtube: YouTube.com/artstudiolife
• Other: TikTok: art.studio.life