We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica Rowden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jessica, appreciate you joining us today. 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?

Earning a full-time living from creative work is certainly a rare thing and I feel extremely lucky to have found ways to make it possible thus far. When I graduated college, I started full time at a creative studio here in Detroit called First Fight. They did an amazing job of bringing me into the professional art world. I learned a lot, wore plenty of hats, and grew my skills every day.

After a few years, I decided to go freelance and that’s where I am now. It’s a never ending amount of work, but I love what I do.

A large part of why I’m here (and often why any successful artist is anywhere), is in thanks to the friends and colleagues that have uplifted my work and made recommendations on my behalf. People like Mel McCann and Julie Craft truly gave me the foundations I needed for a successful art career through their teachings and support. Grounding yourself within community is a must in the art world and I’m endlessly grateful for the ones I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in.

If I could do anything different, it would have been to be more open and engaged with the people around me when I was younger, especially during college. It’s so easy to close yourself off when working creatively but it makes a world of a difference if you have others around you who understand and support what you do.

Jessica, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I work in commercial animation as a freelance cel animator. Essentially, what that means is that I animate traditionally, similar to classic Disney movies. I digitally draw each frame by hand. It’s very time intensive work, just one second of on-screen motion will typically require 12 different drawings. That said, it’s very much worth the effort. I always feel that the final product always has a magical element to it when it’s done this way.

I will often come onto a project when the animation required cannot be done with other programs or other types of animators. Cel animation is one of the most time-intensive processes that can be used for a project, which means it rarely comes cheap. The benefit of it, however, is that the sky’s the limit. There are very few restrictions with this style of animation. If you can draw it, you can do it.

As for my own personal experiences and style, I can happily say that I feel really confident in my drawing capabilities and in my ability to work efficiently within such a time consuming craft. I’m still nowhere close to where I want to be skill-wise but I can say that I’m really proud of how far I’ve come throughout my many, many years of pursuing art.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

In my own experiences with people who never pursue any creative goals or outlets, I’ve found that they rarely understand why I put so much time into the things that I do. Art is the way that I best experience the world and it’s something that resonates with me everyday. It’s how I connect to people, ideas, places, history, memories, nature- everything, really.

I’m so happy with where I’m at but I’ve given up a lot to get here, too. Art trumps nearly everything else in my life, it’s the one constant and is a defining feature of how I live. I make a lot of decisions around my capability to pursue my artistic goals and a lot of other things come second to it. It’s this that seems to never be understood by non-creatives. My life doesn’t revolve around the same conventional milestones, and I’m okay with that. I might never have kids, I might not travel as much, I might not own a grand house or fancy car, but I’m okay with that. Bettering my craft really means the most to me at this point in my life and I don’t think I ever want that to change.

How did you build your audience on social media?

In 2020 this crazy thing happened and I suddenly had a lot of extra time on my hands. Since I couldn’t go anywhere, I decided that I wanted to spend some of my newfound time making a comic. I then started posting 2 pages a week on Instagram. After about a dozen pages, I was starting to see an increase in the amount of people that were keeping up with it. It brought a lot of excitement and I worked hard to see this project through to the end. After 6 months, I finally finished it. It totaled more to than 40 fully painted pages and took hours and hours of work to finish, all done along my full-time job. Over the course of posting it, I gained nearly 50,000 followers

Through that experience I learned that consistent posting and consistent themes, characters, or stories are a fantastic way to gain an audience. I don’t think I’m saying anything new here and there’s plenty of people that will happily tell you how to grow your own account. So what I would rather focus on is how all of that really affected me.

When I finished that comic, I tried my best to keep posting consistently but I was so burnt out. When it was over I felt like I had boxed myself in to a brand that didn’t entirely define what kind of artist I wanted to be. I learned a lot through that whole experience and I think my art really grew thanks to that project but I’m not eager to do it again. Instead, I like to think of it as something that showed me what I was truly passionate about and since then I’ve tried to focus my time and efforts more on animation.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jessicarowdenart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenirodraws/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-rowden-203674266/