We recently connected with Han B. V. and have shared our conversation below.

Han, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I’ve been the “artist” to family and friends for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, maybe 5 or 6, while getting into painting on my own outside of school/daycare, I vividly remember trying to sell watercolors of Hawaii to my grandpa. I listed them as $500 and I remember thinking “oh maybe I can save up enough to get more paper and watercolors”. He gave me $5 for it, but I’m sure that just went towards dolls or something. My first art class was in Kindergarten, and until my senior year of high school was my only class. I submitted my personal art to the AP Studio (advanced placement) art coordinator to try and get into that class since I was doing oils and had a good understanding of art, enough to skip the pre-requisite courses. I was allowed in, won awards at my high school art show, and went on to pursue a professional art degree but did not finish college. I’ve always been an artist for myself first, and doing art for other people all the time is particularly draining to me. Five years after I left college, I found art by artist @ruttu_ruttu going viral on Twitter during the pandemic. I was making miscellanous digital art, and doing photography as a professional for a years with a studio, and I found her work to be amazing. I thought, how fun would it be to try and experiment with vintage style pinup art? The first few pinups I made were of Sally and Jack from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and of the bride of Frankenstein. My model friend Morgan asked if she could post them to Facebook as I don’t have FB, and from there a few other lovely models who run Retro Vixen here in KC followed and loved the pinups too. I didn’t want a lot of folks following me on my personal Instagram so that’s how my art Insta came about. I was playing around with names, and I was thinking “Hannah, But Vintage-Style” and shortened it to HanButVintage. I’ve done work for so many amazing folks, and grown so much since then. I’ve always known I wanted to be some sort of artist professionally, but it wasn’t until this Instagram that I really hit my stride. Most recently I just started printing my own prints and sending them out myself instead of having a 3rd party like RedBubble or Inprnt, and it feels real now that I’m a professional artist with my own shop. I still have my regular “day job” in a completely different industry, so juggling both is going to be interesting moving forward. My sister and brother in law also run their own shop called Bunhugs making acrylic jewelry they design, so I’ve learned a lot from them the past few years on how to set my shop up as well.

Han, 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?

So I already sort of described my art in my previous answer, but I will go for a different perspective here. I draw vintage-style or mid-century inspired art. It started with pinup art and having that as a central theme, but my art has grown a lot over the past two years. I haven’t opened commissions in a while because I do enjoy my free time right now, but I do open them a few times a year. My work has branched out from just pinups to comic-style art, as well as just figure studies. I love doing figure studies and challenging myself to draw different or unique poses. I wouldn’t say my art is vintage-looking all the time, but I do try to add halftones (the little colored dots that make up prints) when I can to give it that feel. I’m alway slearning and striving to be better than I was yesterday which sounds very cliche, but it’s my only real personal goal. Sometimes I think I should be making meaningful or special art all the time, but at the end of the day I just try to make pieces that folks like. Maybe it gives them a smile, or makes them happy for a split moment in their day. That’s really what it’s all about for me. I’m about to dip my toes into sticker making as well since I have the printer for it, and that’s really exciting for me personally. I don’t know, I just want to make art I like, and hopefully others will like it too.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Personally I do not support NFTs. I have some friends who are into them, and it’s not my place to tell them what they can or can’t do. The money has been life changing for some people and I’d never try to downplay that or say that people who do participate are bad people by any means. I just think we need to be more environmentally conscious of our work. People can donate to eco-funds all day until they’re blue in the face, but the damage has already been done and in some cases, we can’t reverse all the negative impacts on our environment. Not to mention the socio-economic impact of crypto in general. And, again, this isn’t a dig at anyone who supports NFTs or makes them, this is just my personal reasoning as to why I won’t get involved. Sometimes it does nag at me in the back of my head that there is so much cash being blown into that industry, but I just remind myself that what I’m doing is enough. I think the NFT market has also really impacted smaller artists getting their work stolen, or paved the way for AI generated art, both really detrimental to the art community on and off the internet.

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

I think for a lot of folks my age or those who were taught art in public schools, references weren’t really used a whole lot. I had this idea in my mind that if you used references in art it was cheating somehow, like poses or facial expressions. I’m to the point now where my skill allows me to create things from scratch without them, but nothing helped me become a better artist than using references. And even just for small things! Also putting myself into an art echo chamber so to speak. I curated my social media feeds (usually just pinterest and instagram) to be only artists that inspired me, references, or models etc. From time to time, I’ll be working on something and it seems like nothing is coming out the way I like, so I’ll just go and scroll socials for a bit until I feel inspired again. Usually by that time, whatever block was keeping me from finishing the piece is gone and I’m able to continue.

Contact Info:

• Website: linktr.ee/hanbutvintage
• Instagram: @hanbutvintage
• Other: Etsy Shop: etsy.com/shop/hanbutvintagestore