We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Fon Leigh. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with fon below.
Fon, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
For me being an illustrator and finding my passion started after entering college, and finding my niche was even later, my senior year. Creating art has always been important to me but I never saw it as a career. But finding love in myself and what I’m creating made me realize how important this was as a potential life for me. When I went through a devastating break up I really found how important creating and making art was to me and how meaningful my art was to other people. Everything about my process and view on life shifted, and through that I was able to forgive, find peace, and move on. My art doesn’t always mean a lot to me, since it’s a big outlet for me to express emotion and feeling, but I know it means a lot to other people. I know when I talk about big feelings and struggles and difficulty alongside showing my work it means something to people. I know it’s important, and I know it makes people feel less alone, or help them work through similar experiences and feelings. Being an illustrator is my everything. If I lost everything I loved and valued, it wouldn’t really matter as long as I could keep painting.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m Fon Leigh. I’m an illustrator, from Long Beach, California. I went to SCAD because they gave me the biggest discount to attend. I chose illustration because what else was there to do, but when I took my first class with Stephen Gardner, I felt like my whole life changed. I had an incredible sense of purpose, joy, and fulfillment. I don’t think I ever had a big passion before and I was obsessed! I started becoming interested in digital, especially since it’s so industry standard but I was always drawn to texture and pattern. So I switched to traditional and found so much love in traditional mixed media illustration. I find a lot of joy in repetition, patterns, and architecture. Both my parents are architects so it makes sense I’m always drawn to tile, and buildings. I think what sets me apart is how personal I am, I also run a youtube channel where the vibes are very friend on FaceTime. I think being a very open and honest person seeps into my work. I don’t focus too hard to realism or making everything perfect, mistakes make the art. Mistakes are honest and true, and I love seeing the parts of my art where I messed up or spilt paint because that’s how I know I made it, because I’m not super perfect either. I love being messy because I’m such a type A workaholic so being a messy artist is my one time I can be messy and disorganized. I think being disorganized and honest is true freedom for yourself and your art. Who wants to be perfect and draw straight lines all the time?
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
I wish I was more exploratory SCAD offers so many programs like SCADamp, ELO’s, SCAD extras, and Friday nude model drawing. These things helped me hone my abilities and learn more about my industry and others. But there’s outside of SCAD things I wish I knew that aren’t directly related but helped me get into my mindset and be creative. Skill share for video editing was a great boon when learning to edit and find joy in video content. STUMP’s plant workshops wasn’t directly beneficial to my art, but I truly believe beinga full person and artist means having hobbies outside of your career. Being in tune with my hands, dirt and plants is also so much fun. It’s so fun meeting with new people for a hobby I don’t often get to discuss or talk about! Dream House Studio’s also gets a shout out because each individual creative has such fun workshops and so much great art downstairs being sold at Starland Strange and Bazaar! I have only taken 2 of their workshops but loved them so much. Sister store to Starland Strange and Bazaar, Superbloom hosts 3 weekly craft nights I love attending! Also Starlandia, I discovered them my freshmen year but I couldn’t have been happier, they have such an assortment of materials I never thought about working with! I love browsing the aisles and finding new paints or pencils to try out!
How did you build your audience on social media?
Don’t try to hard. By that I mean always put in your 100% but the higher standards you give yourself the less you post the more focused on success you are. If you were already perfect at social media you’d start with 1 million followers but no one starts out like that. It’s nicer seeing your growth along your follower count. When it’s more organic growth your engagemnet is more natural and built off of people following you because they like you instead of a random viral video. It’s more important to have a healthy engage audience who cares instead of people who barely watched and forgot to unfollow. I try and be 1% better each time. I think it’s a healthy way to grow with social media and with your brand and business.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://fonleigh.com
- Instagram: @fon.leigh
- Linkedin: @fonleigh
- Youtube: Fon Leigh
