We were lucky to catch up with Kelly Latham recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kelly, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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?

I have been able to earn a full-time living from my creative work. I earned my BFA from the University of Kansas in Illustration and my MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in Sequential Art. After I graduated SCAD, I spent the summer doing art tests, and moved back home for a bit while I waited for results from the art tests and interviews. I landed a job as a designer in Atlanta, and moved back across the country. While working full time as a designer, I was freelancing small illustration and comic projects, as well as running an online art shop, mostly for fun. However, I was unexpectedly laid off with major staffing cuts during COVID, and had to jump head first into freelancing. While at the time, I was devastated, I realized I still had all my people, and I had built a lot of skills over the years I could lean back on.

It launched me into freelancing full time, which was probably the best place for me. I had a lot of freedom, and I was able to work on many different types of projects on my own schedule. Some of these projects included commercial surface design for kitchen and home decor, and paper goods such as wrapping paper, gift bags, gift tags, and greeting cards. This allows me to work with patterns and holiday art, and I stay connected to opportunities to have my art sold at large retailers such as Target, Dollar Tree, CVS, Belk, and Macys. I also worked to build my online shop, https://www.kellylatham.com/store, and dove into social media marketing. Unexpectedly, my bookmark designs took off thanks to #BookTok and my bookmarks and stickers can be found in multiple shops around the country. The largest part of my freelance income comes from selling as a vendor in Artist Alley at Comic Conventions. I travel around Georgia and the surrounding states to sell my products directly to consumers via rented spaces at community events. My most recent event was Anime Weekend Atlanta, the country’s largest southeastern anime convention, where I sold paper based illustrated goods of customers over the course of 3 days. It was a great event and I hope to earn a spot again next year.

Currently, I am a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design. I teach a full time schedule September to March in Foundation Studies of drawing and design classes. I commute back and forth from Atlanta to Savannah weekly, and spend my springs and summers doing comic conventions for the most part, with other illustration and comics freelance sprinkled in.

Looking back, the biggest thing holding me back was the need for full time employment with health insurance. It was a silver lining to be laid off. While it is astronomically expensive without and employer, I still found a way to afford health insurance with my monthly income, opening up more opportunities than I would have been able to experience with a standard 8-5 job.

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

I am a jack of all trades, and I use this skill to apply my illustrated work to many mediums. My content is all ages friendly in a cartoony style with limited color palettes. I love drawing animals and making people smile and laugh with my work. Mainly, I do comics and make illustrated paper goods.

My run am autobiographical webcomic called Kelly is Best https://www.instagram.com/kellyisbestcomic/ where I explore everyday problems with a slice of humor. I am in the beginnings of my comics career, but I have worked on a few anthologies with am currently in the process of pitching my original graphic novel ideas.

For my illustrated paper goods, I mostly sell art prints, stickers, and bookmarks. I’ve been approaching art as a business since elementary school, so it’s just been a natural thing to pursue! In elementary school, I started selling friendship bracelets at recess, and since then I couldn’t be stopped. Since I was 10, I’ve tried as many arts and crafts media as I could get my hands on, and then tried to sell the results. I opened an Etsy shop in high school where I sold knit hats and fleece blankets, jewelry, and anything else I could make from the supplied purchased at my local Hobby Lobby. In college, I started my online shop tied to my business website, but actually started promoting it during covid. Before covid, I started doing in person vendor shows on the weekends where I would travel, set up a display, and sell my art in person. However, those came to a grinding halt with lockdown. So like many artists, I worked on my online presence, and started to market my art digitally. On the fly, I learned how to ship things from my house, take product photography, and become a small business owner. https://www.kellylatham.com/store

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn was that a creative career was unsustainable. I did not always have the support I did not, and was discouraged to pursue art school. But once I opened my eyes and looked around, I couldn’t stop seeing opportunities for artists! Every box in the grocery store was designed by a designer. Everything that appears on any screen was designed by a designer. All consumer media has a whole team of artists. Any single episode of a show has on average 50-100 people working on it. When you multiply that by every season of every show on every channel or streaming platfrom, those numbers start to add up. Like any industry, once you get into the workforce, you start to make connections and opportunities reveal themselves, but for some reason, people just don’t see art that way. They see it as a luxury, despite consuming hours of it each day. It all creatives suddenly went into different industries, it would be a sad world.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media is a beast. I didn’t understand it for a long time, and honestly, most of what I know might be wrong or irrelevant now because it changes so quickly. Something that worked a month ago to bring a lot of attention might not work at all next week, and no body can plan for it.

I built my social media platform by teaching in 1-3 minute micro sessions. I have 16.9k followers on TikTok, which isn’t a ton, but is more than I’d ever thought I’d have. Originally, I was just sharing my art, but then one day I made a video warning artist about comic cons that ask people to pay Friends and Family through PayPal instead of properly, and that got over 1000 views. I was SO blown away. So I continued talking about artist alley tips, and then one day I shot a tutorial of how I made bookmarks in my home studio. I posted it, and it blue up over night with 50k views, I got over 40 orders in my online shop for my bookmark. I saw a need for step by step instructions on how to make, market, and sell products, so I decided that was my niche for TikTok. And using my products as examples, I market my products indirectly.

My advice to those just starting to build a social media presence is pick between being educational or entertaining, and find your niche. A niche is like minded people to yourself. If you like making artwork of frogs, other people who like frogs will appreciate your work, and that is your niche. People can have multiple niches, board, or oddly specific, and they can change over time. Taylor Swift is a great example of changing her niche over time. She’s gone from Country to Pop to Folk and now is a kinda coming back around to Pop again. However, just starting out, especially students, you are meant to experiment and find the best way you do something. So putting yourself in a box from the get go can be self sabotage, as you might not find out truly where you are meant to be. So niche down by leaning into what you naturally like, not what is popular, and don’t be afraid to change and grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kellylatham.com/store
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sleepyheadkl/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KellyLathamArt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/sleepyheadkl
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/sleepyheadkl
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@sleepyheadkl https://www.patreon.com/sleepyheadkl