We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Heidi Farina . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Heidi below.

Heidi , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?

Printing from home! I went into this career change because I love art and I have a deep need to create and create the places that bring me a deeps sense of joy and peace. My goal is to share this out with others that value and love the Northwest region of North America. When I started making prints in house, it was sinking my time dealing with printer issues, wasted supplies, etc. I eventually pivoted to outsource this and it drastically changed how much time I had in a positive direction to focus on creating.

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?

I have been creative my whole life, including focusing on art heavily in high school in AP courses, etc. In college, I majored in Fine Art for the first two years, with a focus on painting and sculpture. Mid college career, I started to worry about the security of a career in art and took a biology course that really piqued my interest in science. I ended up pivoting to a bachelors in Physiology/ Zoology and with an emphasis on genetics in ecology. This took me in a new path for about 15 years. I worked in ecological research from the Rocky Mountains to South Africa, doing field work using non invasive genetics methods to study animal populations. Eventually I ended up in medical research in genetics and then genetics industry. This pivot took me deep into studying nature, environments and genetics, the first two the subject I now paint for a career.

After about a decade off of full time art, I missed the creative process immensely. Unfortunately, my science career was time intensive and I lost time to focus on myself and would often start a creative project only to pack it away and never finish it. We moved from WY, to CA, to WA. All three of these states, especially WA , my background in ecology, and my love of outdoor sports, lead me to feel highly inspired to paint WA landscapes. When COVID happened, I found myself with a lot more time at home, not traveling for my science career and started to paint again. It felt like I got a part of my soul back after such a long hiatus from daily practice. In January of 2023, I resigned from my science career and went full time artist. It has been the exact thing I needed in life and I am grateful daily that I found my way back to art. Now I run my art business full time, launching collections of landscape paintings, working on private commissions, and murals.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I started my art journey during COVID. This along with my hermit tendencies, I knew that I wanted to run the majority of my business online, when I decided to go full time. I took a lot of time to research social media and marketing, specifically in the art sector. I spent about a year testing posts, reels, etc to see how they would translate to social media presence and customer base. Then when transitioning to my art business full time I started to put all of the pieces of what I had been testing to practice in my social media presence. That combined for asking feedback from mentor artists really helped me take off with the social media side when I started full time. This has been key in driving my business primarily online and remote.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I had my daughter in 2021. I knew by then that my goal was a full time art business, but also, I wasn’t quite where I needed to be from a business perspective to ,make the jump to full time. For that reason, I had to juggle being a new parent, working a full time science career, and running a small business at night. It was exhausting, I spent over a year doing everything related to art in the late hours of night from 9pm- 1am when my daughter was asleep, I had no job obligations, and could focus on the art without distractions. This meant for months and months, I was not sleeping much and I was juggling a lot of hats. There were definitely times where I was wondering why I was doing this to myself, but also knew deep down that going full time art was absolutely part of what would allow me long term happiness and fulfilment. It was a hard 20 months, but also it was all of this hard work, planning, and prep work that set the stage for me to pivot to such a different career path.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heidifarinaart-pacificnorthwestpalette.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heidifarinaart/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidi-farina-a3322238?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
• Tik Tok: @Pacificnorthwestpalette

Image Credits
Amy g Photography for the picture of me painting and the first picture of me holding the blue art piece.