We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Madeline Peng Miller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Madeline Peng, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’ve love to hear an interesting investment story – what was one of the best or worst investments you’ve made? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)
About a year and a half after I’d graduated from college, I found myself at a major crossroads in my life, regarding my health and daily routines. I was feeling incredibly stuck in some detrimental habits and I made a firm decision to shed them in exchange for a better and more fulfilling lifestyle. To build it, I’d decided I had to add some thoroughly enriching activities to my life and schedule, including new cooking routines, gymnastics classes, and live figure drawing sessions. I hadn’t done any figure drawing since undergrad and I felt pretty rusty, but I’d seen some classes being advertised in my area and forced myself to attend. The first day, it was pouring rain and I came in five minutes late to a full studio with no chairs open. I sat on the floor and thought my drawings were ill-proportioned and awkward, but when the time came to pay for the class, I made a split-second decision to buy the bulk deal (8 classes) instead of paying for the slightly more expensive single class. It was primarily a gut choice to save the $3.50, but I knew by the end of the session that I wanted to make drawings that looked better again. I’m a comic surrealist illustrator in my regular career so realistic figure drawing fluency didn’t feel like the most crucial skill at the time, but as I embraced practicing more and more, I began to see improvement in all my work. The classes ran from 7-10PM Monday nights and, as I tucked them into my weekly schedule, I started seeing tremendous progress– even just between my first and last drawings in the 3-hour blocks. I eventually started selling my originals that I drew in class at local markets and paying for all the classes I’d purchased in their entirety with those profits. At one point, someone running a venue I’d taken classes at had seen some of my sketches on my Instagram and suggested I teach a few workshops there. The drive to push myself into a direction of a skill I hadn’t touched in years, the desire to do better at my own pace, and my investment of my own time, money, and dedication ended up paying off in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I’d figured it would just be a distraction in my week, some time to zone out and practice shading on a weeknight– and instead it lead to new products I could sell for easy money, new professional connections in an unexpected environment, and lots of technical improvement in my personal work.
Madeline Peng, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a queer hapa illustrator, painter, and designer who specializes in comics and fantasy/surrealist work. I make oil, acrylic, and gouache paintings and draw in ink, Copics, and graphite, creating prints and stickers that I sell online and at art markets all around Los Angeles. I’ve also done freelance illustration, designing advertisements, logos, tattoos, and commissions for businesses and individuals, for the last 8 years. My personal art can be described as semi-fantastical cartoon surrealism mostly focusing on femme subjects, their relationships with themselves, one another, and their environments. Often, I illustrate bizarre scenes and characters through a slice-of-life lens, alongside fantastic exaggerations of mundane scenarios, blurring boundaries of binary identities and our different perceived realities. I’m most proud of the pieces I’ve made that visually speak to people without any explanation. Paintings of SFV strip malls that couples tell me look just like the corner they grew up on, drawings of dining rooms overrun with earwigs that someone will buy because it reminded them of getting out of the hardest living situations they’ve ever had, or even fan art of the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, that spark a conversation with a stranger about what it was like to finally see a movie with a lead character who looked just like our mothers. These shared moments of connection that stem from me sitting at my studio desk, sketching out a drawing that feels authentic and sincere to my experience, is always what means the most to me about making work like this.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I built my social media audience over an incredibly long period of time. I started my artist Instagram in the 9th grade because I wanted a place to share my new drawings with my friends that wasn’t over text, since I didn’t have an iPhone and my images would always send in low resolution. I would try to use popular art hashtags and engage in trendy drawing challenges, but I quickly realized that these didn’t have much longevity. I had what felt like a huge breakthrough when I was 15, when a popular actress shared a drawing I made of her to her page and I saw my follower count jump from 30 to about 230. I was absolutely through the roof at first, but I slowly noticed these new followers didn’t engage with any of my other content, and eventually turned into mostly ghost accounts. I fell off for a while before I started college, when I only reopened my art instagram to try and get small commission jobs. I changed the name and archived just about every single post to rebrand. This time I focused more on posting art I was proud of, assigning less importance to what did well or poorly in analytics. By posting regularly and putting out work I really believed in, I was able to amass a following that truly resonated with my work and wasn’t just following fads, getting ready to lose interest at any moment. I’ve been able to get the most success through work I’ve done in real life: making connections with other successful artists I’ve met, getting booked for art events that feature my name and account, and getting featured on people’s stories. The only trend I still try to keep up with is Inktober– a month of 31 prompts to make drawings in response to, over 31 days. I’ve done it for 5 years in a row now and it’s honestly a little counterproductive to my social media success. I always lose a few followers, fall out of favor with the algorithm, and end up with a strange black-and-white Instagram feed that may even drive people to click off my page. There are a few reasons, despite all this, that I stick with it. On one hand, I think it’s a great exercise. Forcing myself to make and publish content that isn’t perfect or entirely marketable every single day is phenomenal practice, both in everyday discipline and drawing skill. By the end of the month, every single year, I feel more confident in my lines and quick compositional skills. On the other hand, I think it acts as a good reminder to not take my social media presence so seriously, to keep in mind that what has gotten me the furthest is making my feed very genuine to who I am and what my work means to me. By posting something so raw and direct every day, I feel like I’m breaking the mold of artificiality that drives me so crazy about a lot of Instagram’s best performing content, and I’m really doing something for myself. Though my online presence is very important and gets me events, jobs, and connections, it is crucial for me (and anyone else whose craft/business is their person passion/work) to keep in mind the separation of my ego and self worth from my online performance.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
When I first started doing art professionally, I did everything for free. Even before the time of favors in exchange for artwork, I used to just make work for people to have it see the light of day. By the time I was in school for art, I’d decided to put some low prices on various commissions and I watched myself continue to get taken advantage of quite a bit. Seeing people ask for more and more unpaid labor from me on finished pieces and watching agreements I’d made with organizations get broken, with my art ending up places I didn’t give permission to, I learned I would have to eventually put up better boundaries for my workflow. I got my first professional art job working for minimum wage at a local radio station, designing all of their merch, posters, and graphics. I remember being faced with the densest workload I’d ever had in my adult life, spending each week creating dozens of unique illustrations for 10+ departments and events. Nevertheless, I was thrilled to be working as an artist professionally, and I kept making designs for them until I graduated. I continued to work freelance gigs with little artistic freedom, just to make my money and sometimes a new connection, but it wasn’t until I got my first job out of school that I realized how worthwhile all this often unpaid work has been. A teacher at UCSB told me he’d seen all the work I put on my Instagram account and that he’d get me an interview with an artist friend of his who needed a painting assistant. I met the artist and we hit it off, but what he told me really impressed him was the sheer volume of work that I had online. I’d only had one real art job before, but I had hundreds of clean and finished commissions and illustrations from the past 4-5 years. I started working for this artist at a rate over 3x than I had ever been paid before and before long, he promoted me to manage his art studio. Often, I’ll hear artists talk about how you need to value your skills highly and never work below your pay grade, but I did find that after working like that for so long, I’d developed a massive bank of work to pull from that helped me get truly professional gigs that made everything worth it. If you aren’t seeing profit off of your work and it starts to weigh on you, focus on building your future, that repertoire of all the skills and techniques you can perfect in the meantime and all the ways to push your work into the world. Luck is merely preparation that meets opportunity.
Contact Info:
- Website: madelinepengmiller.com
- Instagram: @ultimatevagina
Image Credits
Parker Tozier Madeline Peng Miller