We recently connected with Maddy DePaul and have shared our conversation below.

Maddy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

My parents did such a wonderful job of giving me so many art opportunities. I am not talking about buying me the latest and greatest 64 pack of Crayola crayons with the sharpener. I am talking about letting me figure out how to make my own 64 pack of crayons using my moms baking dishes, a 12 pack of primary color crayons, and the oven. My parents were constantly just letting me figure it out and use whatever supplies in the house I wanted to. One of my first memories of being creative without limits was around the age of four or five. I took my mom’s OPI nail polish into the bathroom and laid a Kleenex on the tile floor and painted an entire house scene with the nail polish on this 6inch square Kleenex. Of course the nail polish bled right through the Kleenex and it was a huge mess, but my mom knew that some nail polish remover would take it off the tile and everything would be okay. I am not saying my parents let me destroy their house, but my parents were so great at letting me figure things out within reason. My parents also did a beautiful job of leaving me alone while I did projects in my room. I had free rein with anything I wanted to use in the house and however much time I wanted to spend. They didn’t give me one table, one chair, one pack of markers, and one coloring book, they gave me an entire house of supplies to build inventions with.

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

I own Gray Duck Art, a local art company in the Twin Cities. Ever since I was a kid, anything artsy-fartsy and hands-on was my jam. Owning an art business has been a lifelong dream of mine. When I was a kid, I would go around selling arts and crafts to neighbors and friends and now I am so grateful to be able to send art projects all over the country.

I grew up in Apple Valley, Minnesota and went on to pursue a degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in art from The University of Wisconsin-Stout.

After college, I started realizing that adults in this world typically feel like they can’t do anything creative and that started to frustrate me, so I started Gray Duck Art. I want everyone to realize they are more creative than they think. I believe we are not losing our creativity as we grow older, but we may be losing some creative confidence, so I continue to push myself and the world to find the energy and space to get creative.

I am an artist first and a business owner second, but sometimes those titles flip flop a little. I work with a team of 5 other very talented artists to inspire adults all over the country that they are actually creative. Our team specializes in creating paint by number kits of people’s pets. We offer an in-person event, offered mostly at breweries and wineries and ship kits all over the country.

Our team is incredibly talented and hand draws every single pet kit we produce. We create about 100 kits a week and are growing. Each one of our artists customize every single detail for our amazing customers. We hand mix an entire set of 12-18 paint colors that perfectly match the pet’s coloring draw about 120 individual shapes on every canvas that make up a beautiful and detailed paint by number of our customer’s pets.

We are a women-owned team and still very small. When people purchase a kit from us they are truly supporting a small business and we are so grateful.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Yes my side hustle turned into a full time job. I was side hustling my art career my entire life. It started at a very young age, like 3rd or 4th grade. I started selling crafts for a dollar, or two, and then I became more talented and started knitting. I sold knit goods for a little more money, and then I started painting, and sold my paintings for a little more money.

I side hustled pretty hard in high school and college and eventually graduated from UW-Stout. I worked in the business world for about a year and a half after graduating college for a boutique firm in Organizational Development, which I loved, but it wasn’t the career path for me.

During my time in the 9-5 world, I started teaching at a few breweries making a couple hundred dollars a week. After about a year of double working, I was pretty touched out of both jobs and it was no longer sustainable or fair to anyone involved. At the end of 2017, I decided to quit my full time “real job” (as some would say). I didn’t tell anyone I was going to quit my 9-5, and it came as a shock to a lot of people. I knew I could make it as an artist though. I was not going to be a starving artist. I was going to figure this out.

After teaching more of the traditional paint and sip events during my time side hustling in college and the business world, I decided to try a paint your pet event, about 3 weeks after I left the business world. I spent about 40-80 hours coming up with a process for these paint by number events. I launched my first event, and it sold out within a few hours through online sales. I was shocked and thought there was something wrong with Eventbrite.

I taught about 5,000 people this class in my 2 or 3 years of doing Gray Duck Art full time. I taught 5-7 nights a week and was drawing and painting on the side. I worked completely opposite schedules of everyone I knew, but this was my passion and I knew I needed to work to make this business grow.

In 2019, Gray Duck Art started offering shipped kits, so people outside of Minnesota could paint their pet. I am so glad we started this portion of our business because…

2020 there was (is) a global pandemic that made our business take a huge 180. We went from 90% of our business being in-person events and 10% of our business being shipped kits to 100% shipped kits overnight. It pushed us to really grow the shipped kits side of our business, but it was a very bumpy transition. We hired two (very amazing) artists to help create kits and had some huge shifts in the business.

It is almost 2023 now and we are doing events now across the entire country and individual shipped kits to people’s homes. I like to say that we truly have the best of both worlds right now because our customers can go enjoy a group atmosphere at a brewery, or have a chill night in and paint at home.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I think being consistent on social really helped our business. We don’t have any sort of marketing budget (yet), so we post non-paid ads on social and regular posts every few days. I tried my best to not get discouraged when a post only receives a handful of views. Another thing that helped us so much is how visual our team, product, and process is. People seem to really like seeing a before and after of these paint by number kits.

Contact Info:

• Website: grayduckart.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/grayduckart
• Facebook: facebook.com/grayduckart