We recently connected with Hannah Holt and have shared our conversation below.

Hannah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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 am lucky enough to be able to make a living from my creative work. But it took some time and a lot of work to get here! I started calligraphy as a hobby in 2013 and slowly turned it into a side hustle in 2020 – something that made me a little extra money, but didn’t have any plans to take it full time as my day job at the time was still something I wanted to do.

I officially started the business in 2020, I was furloughed from my day job due to the pandemic and finally had the time to see if I liked running a business. Over the next year I started to build up the business and my clients, my day job also came back and by the end of 2021 I started to have to durn down a lot of work for clients due to the demands of my day and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I was also getting really burned out from my day job and was ready to make a change.

At the beginning of 2022 I decided I wanted to become a full time artist and entrepreneur and started to make plans to make that reality. Over the course of the next 10 months I made sure I had enough savings for 4-6 months expenses as a buffer as I get the business started. I also started making connections with clients to set myself up to take on a lot of work as soon as I quit my day job.

In my industry, November-December are a really busy time of year for brand activations and events to do live calligraphy and engraving. I decided to leave my job in October so I could hit the ground running and have the availability to take on as much work as possible.

The following year consisted of pitching to new clients, connecting with former clients, networking with other people in my industry to book as many events as I could. It was an experimental year, learning the busy seasons and slow season, knowing when to capitalize on my time and when to take a break. But I ended the year more than doubling my previous year and made enough to pay the bills.

Looking back, I’m really happy with the trajectory of my business and where it’s headed. Spending time in the beginning to figure out what I wanted to do, how to organize the business, and what services I wanted to offer while being financially supported by my day job was so helpful to set a good foundation when I wanted to go full time.

Hannah, 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?

I am a calligraphy and engraving artist, which often gets responded to with “I didn’t even know that was a job!” Lucky for me, it is and it’s the most fun. I work with luxury brands and event planners to elevate their guest experience through high end details like hand calligraphed place cards and personalized items. I also offer live calligraphy, engraving and painting as interactive entertainment to create an experience that is customized and unique to the event.

I first started calligraphy in 2013 when I was in grad school. My mom is an artist and had sent me her old calligraphy supplies thinking it would be something I would be interested in trying. It became a great, creative outlet and eventually I started getting asked to do place cards for friends wedding or create prints as gifts. When I moved to Las Vegas, I was introduced to live calligraphy and knew I wanted to make that my full time job.

My main goal with on-site calligraphy is to create connection with the guests or clients through a deeply personalized piece of art. I love being able to take a fragrance and turn it into an heirloom they can treasure by adding a name, a significant date, or favorite phrase.

The moments that make me feel most proud are when I can create something that makes someone feel seen or tells a piece of their story. Calligraphy is often a luxury service and when I’m able to take that luxury art and create a meaningful moment really makes it all worth it.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Two things come to mind when I think about how society can support creatives and artists:

Firstly, hire them and pay their worth. When you need a unique, special, luxury, custom, elevated, playful, etc. element to your event or store or business find an artist in your community and pay their fees. There are endless options of artists and creatives in all communities to help you create a meaningful moments for your customers and their work deserves the appropriate pay for it. Take a few minutes to search local artists when you need something done before opting for a quick and easy big business option.

Secondly, once you hire them, trust them. A major green flag from a client is when they give me a directive on color scheme, theme, or vibe for an event and then say tell me “do what you think is best”. I love when a client has a vision for something and then trusts me and work to accomplish it. We, as artists, charge what we do because we have the skills and creative eye to bring something to life in a quality way and trusting us to do that is one of my favorite ways to support the arts.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks early on in my entrepreneurial journey and it really helped reframe my mindset around what some of the limits were that I put on myself and how to remove them. It opened up a lot of the mental roadblocks I didn’t realize I had that was making the road to owning a business much harder than it needed to be.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.tallymarkcalligraphy.com
• Instagram: @tallymarkcalligraphy

Image Credits
Jazzmin at True Color Creatives Vanessa at Honey Fire Photo Susie Qiu Madison Barton Photography Amber and Co. Photography