We were lucky to catch up with Liliana Penagos recently and have shared our conversation below.

Liliana, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you 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?

Being a freelance artist is a constant hustle! Or at least, that is the way it can feel. Even though I have very consistent work and often an actual overload – I’m fortunate to have loyal clients I’ve had for years and am constantly meeting new ones, still, it can feel like the moment I take a break, they will all forget about me and I might never work again.

But, for me, part of the reason I want to freelance forever is to continue to learn and be challenged in every new design problem a new client will bring. Searching youtube for the right tutorial I need has become a skill on it’s own. I also enjoy the idea of making a name for myself in the industry, setting my own hours and limits of how much work I can take on (the limit does not exist), and constantly making new connections and becoming even a little part of different people’s projects is pretty fun and rewarding.

This of coarse comes with it’s own challenges. Self marketing, worrying about health insurance and retirement savings on my own, explaining why I’ve turned down full time jobs to my parents, and with the most recent years, working alone. Luckily, I love my home setup and being able to take my pup Lucy for a quick walk or making lunch while something is rendering. I can also have my Netflix on all day in the background without feeling like someone is walking by and thinking this means I’m not working.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Liliana Penagos and I’ve been a one woman band, freelance designing, illustrating, and animating since graduating from Parsons the New School of Design in 2008. I lived and worked in NY up until February 2020 when my partner and I decided to give Atlanta a try. 3 years later we have a house and solid roots here. I started in reality TV in NY, making show opens and doing assistant editor tasks. That was a long time ago and since then I’ve worked for clients ranging from Cardi B to Nickelodeon and WebMD to PBS and everyone in between.

I’m not sure if everyone realizes that all different types of businesses need visuals, those fun bumpers telling you “We’ll be right back” in between SpongeBob episodes, an investment company wanting a digestible video explaining what P/E ratios are, or trippy graphics happening on the LED screens at a music festival. Someone like me is behind the scenes creating all that. I feel like I have a unique skill of actually being able to jump from silly characters to more clean cut design work and then also being able to make all of it come further to life through animation.

Over the past 3 years, surprise, since the pandemic, I wanted to get back into illustration without restrictions of an assignment and I have been having the best time making art on my ipad. This has actually led me to getting editorial illustration assignments with Yahoo, a longtime client I had mostly only done design and animation work for. I have also recently had a couple of my art pieces in a group art show in downtown Atlanta. My next creative goal is to get into murals. I’m hoping to get a chance to start by creating a manageable small one somewhere near my neighborhood.

I like to draw inspiration from my Colombian heritage, my work has to have vibrant colors, animals, fruit, and nature when appropriate, and an air of lightheartedness. For me, creativity is about more than just creating beautiful or clever images—it’s about bringing joy and silliness to everything I put out there.

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

Waiting for inspiration and wanting things to be “perfect”. I struggled in school because I would procrastinate and wouldn’t just start making something and then seeing where it could go, instead I would think and think for hours of what would be the exact right image, and then throw something terrible together at the last minute to get it done. Realistically, this straight up does not work if your a working artist, you have assignments and deadlines you have to hit, but that doesn’t have to be a negative! As soon as I get an assignment I start thinking of a concept or design layout and even if my idea if not totally fleshed out, I start doodling or cutting out images and throwing out text design and seeing what is working. Sometimes it can come together quickly or a new idea comes out of it and I go explore that design instead. With assignments you can then show your client/creative director and then see what they say and go from there, maybe it needs more work and they can give you the direction they want or maybe its done, woohoo, on to the next! With my own artwork I can walk away from it for while and then go back and art direct myself and see what’s working or not, but the important thing is there’s something there to work with. Don’t worry about making it great from the start, it’ll get there, or it might suck, but then you got that bad idea out of the way.’

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Putting work out there that doesn’t make me cringe in 10 years and makes my parents smile.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lilianapenagos.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pendejaporpeppers/