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

Kelly , appreciate you joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My mother always said yes if I wanted to try something new. She allowed me to use materials around the house for art and craft projects. If she was making Christmas ornaments or painting the walls, she let me to help her. I knew if I asked her if I could paint the walls in my room, she would permit it. In college, a teacher asked me the secret to my craftsmanship on a project that involved glue, sandpaper, and sprays paint. I answered that my mother allowed me to use whatever was around the house and I just knew how they worked. Using different types of art supplies like paints and adhesives becomes a second nature with lots of practice, and my mom allowed that while I was young.

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

My names is Kelly Sparks, and I am an independent fantasy artist. My primary medium is acrylic on wood panel, and I paint mostly small framed portraits of cats, horses and unicorns. I sell my work on my website, www.kellysparksart.com, mostly via Instagram, @kellysparksart.

Born in 1978, I was a child of the 80’s and a horse girl, so lots of horse and unicorn images influenced my creativity- anywhere from My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, and Lisa Frank to a How To Draw Horses books from a Scholastics book fair, illustrated children’s books, and random sheets of horse stickers that ended up in my collections. I owned horses and lots of cats, as well. I still do.

I started illustrating in elementary school, and my teachers often noticed my love for drawing and encouraged me. My mother let me make anything I wanted at home with any supplies I could get my hands on. She took me to art supply stores for new pencils and papers to try. Wire, spray paint, and random stuff around the house was all fair game if I wanted to use it. My mom bought me a horse when I was ten, and I spent a very good bit of my youth watching that horse just exist: eating, moving, watching her hair blow in the wind. I was obsessed. I read books on horse breeds and horse conformation and hoof trimming. Anything and everything horse was fascinating to me.

I wasn’t sure what to do with my future in high school, but I won an illustration contest my junior year that won a chunk of money for my high school and a paid vacation for me and my family. My art teacher was extremely supportive of me. She managed to secure that money entirely for her classroom. The contest was “Make a Monster” for M&M/Mars. It was one of the things you’d find an entry for in a grocery store display or a magazine ad (different times, the 90’s). I surprised everyone by drawing a fairly scary-looking monster, not my usual mermaids or flowing-haired girls. It was a flying beast with wings, based mostly on Wolverine from my brother’s X-Men comics.

I attended The Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. From 1996-2000. I worked on campus all four years as a lab technician in the three-dimensional illustration lab, where I learned models, miniatures, mold-making, and casting. I graduated with a bachelors in illustration, but without knowing what I really liked to do besides painting portraits.

Without a direction to take in art, I married right out of college and had three children over the next decade. I didn’t make much art in that time as parenting was all-encompassing. In 2010, I stumbled upon a magazine featuring a doll artist I immediately adored and admired. Not being able to afford one of her dolls, I started using 3-D skills from my college work study to make my own dolls. I made and sold porcelain ball-jointed dolls for about six years. I illustrated a children’s book for a friend who self-published, and through that I learned that I don’t like book illustration as a career option.

While marketing my dolls through Facebook and instagram, I managed to find my way to a community of fantasy art and imaginative realism artists. I’d never quite known where I belonged in the art world, but the fantasy art community was welcoming and extremely helpful. I found out how to make the art I really enjoyed making and how to sell it.

I am still amazed and always grateful that people buy my work. I’m grateful they spend their money to hang my work on their walls and that it has meaning for them. I appreciate every artist who has encouraged me to creative and to market the work that beings me joy to make. Painting simple portraits to be meditative and fun, and I let intuition guide me through the process of making. The work I enjoy making the most is often what sells the best. I feel that the love I put into my work comes through to my audience. I hope to make more 3-D work and to develop my skills as a storyteller and illustrator.

Thanks for reading- writing is not my favorite thing, and cats keep interrupting me.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

My business is in a home studio and started very small, adding supplies and tools as I could afford them. I guess my method of starting off was “bootstrapping.” When I started making dolls, I bought some basic supplies and then asked my high school teacher if I could fire my porcelain doll parts in the kiln at the school. She said yes, as the kiln had been purchased for the art room with money I’d won in a contest in high school. I put together a few dolls and sold them, then bought my own tiny doll kiln with the profit. I asked my neighbors if I could use my kiln in their garage because my home had insufficient wiring. Over them I bought a larger kiln, updated my house’s wiring, and bought more supplies. Luck and support from my family and friends played a big part in my ability to make progress as well.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

After art school, I had to unlearn what some teachers had put into our heads as students. I think this is a common thing with artists I’ve talked to. “Don’t paint thing like that,” came from many of my fine arts class teachers. “Paintings must have X, Y, and Z to be good.” Illustrator teachers were more understanding of how and what I wanted to make, but it still took a while after college for me to find permission to make the work that I wanted to instead of work that I thought I should make for others to like it.

A breakthrough moment was seeing Annie Stegg Gerard’s work, that she was making beautiful images of animals, unicorns, and lovely girls with flowing hair, that she was doing it beautifully and was a successful commercial and fine artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.kellysparksart.com
• Instagram: Www.Instagram.com/kellysparksart
• Facebook: Www.Facebook.com/kellysparksart

Image Credits
Kelly Sparks Jenn Nordstrom Photography for portrait