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

Kayanna , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I am very happy to be living my life as an entrepreneur artist. I love being able to use my talents to make a living; I encourage anyone with the dream of self employment to follow it. I used to work for businesses, the standard 9-5’s, in my teenage years to early twenties. The difference between working for yourself and typical 9-5 is night and day. With sole proprietorship I have gotten to enjoy meeting new people everyday, working on fresh and exciting projects, and bringing meaningful and practically priced art to my community. I hope to continue as a creative as long as life lets me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I originally got into my craft as a child, being inspired by the cartoon animations I watched on the daily. I would copy the characters on the screen to my sketch book and practice until they looked right. There came a satisfaction from recreating their work and understanding how to draw through recreation. As I grew older I set my sights on drawing from life. This is when I started to enjoy drawing people and animals. The more I practiced the closer my drawings reflected the subjects; I would gain a lot of joy when I was able to make a photo realistic piece. I realized as time went on that I had a talent I should be using to provide art for clients in my community. This is when “Kay’s Caricatures” was born- the mission: to provide caricature portraits that are fun, fast, and reasonably priced. I believe what sets Kay’s Caricatures apart from others is that I am quite fast at creating my works. Clients can expect to order a picture and pick it up same day in 20-40 mins depending on the subject matter. For example, most animal portraits I create based of client phone photos only take 30 mins to complete. I take great pride in my animal portraits and enjoy the looks on the client’s faces when their pieces are handed to them.

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

Share, share, share! If you have had a great experience with an artist share that story with friends or family. I’ve had so many wonderful people in my corner who have given me so much support just by word of mouth. Sharing stories, links on social media, or following an artists page are all exceptional ways to help your local artist. Of course it doesn’t hurt to buy a piece or two either!

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

If I could tell myself one thing when starting out it would be ” Network as much as you can with your fellow artists/vendors they are amazing resources.” People working in your same field have wealth’s of knowledge and are indispensable especially when starting out. Fellow artists can inform you on things like cost effectiveness, finding shows and galleries, do’s and don’ts of the field. So making friends and stepping out from your self can be a major building block to your business.

Contact Info:

• Website: Kayanna.clark7@gmail.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KaysCaricatures