Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Monica Roesner. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Monica, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

From as early as I can remember, I always had a passion for art and had parents that supported that dream. By the time I entered high school I knew I wanted to have a creative career of some sort, so I used that time to experiment and explore what was going to be a good fit for me. Joining my high-school’s newspaper Junior year is what ended up solidifying my choice to go into graphic design for college. I found that I thrived creating work in response to prompts from writers, and wanted to make work that influenced students to pick up the paper and read. I was fortunate to attend college at the Kansas City Art Institute and that curriculum gave me a great sampling of the types of creative careers I could go into. I was initially drawn to digital design and after attending a lecture from a visiting design professional I had a lightning rod moment where I knew that user experience was the career for me! After having my direction picked I pursued as many internships as I could and landed a part time job my senior year that eventually turned into my first full time UX Designer role post graduation. While I love my UX career, I still have a passion for fine art, so I have leveraged the stability of that job to support my side hustle, Roaming Planchette, where I sell my illustration work along side my spouse’s ceramic work.

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.

Roaming Planchette is a Kansas City based illustration and ceramic business run by myself and my spouse. Our work is inspired by witchcraft and nature with queer positive and tongue-in-cheek humor themes.

Our brand stance originated from a place of healing and reclaiming of my identity. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household and hid my bisexuality from my family until I was in my 30s. After coming out, I knew I wanted to start making work that spoke to my experience, and to all the other queer and deconstructing people out there. Leaning into the humor has been a lot of fun, and I think it can be really powerful reclaiming past feelings by making work that prompts a smile or chuckle.

Outside of messaging, we honestly just really like playing and experimenting! We mostly make work that will catch the attention of witchy, booktok, and smoking communities. For ceramics we like to focus on functional objects like cauldron mugs, book page holders and trays. For our illustration our favorite products are specialty UV reactive stickers that glow in the dark, or have hidden designs in invisible ink. We also sell a variety of regular vinyl stickers, prints, and postcards.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

With the rise of inflation and disparity between the ultra-wealthy and lower classes I think it is in becoming increasingly more important that our society starts to reclaim our spending power. So much of the economy is currently ruled by big box stores making ultra-high profits, but if we can have shift the majority of our spending to support local business we can influence that spread of wealth.

The next time you need to get a gift, or new item go out to your local markets and stores and buy something there rather than a big box store. Whatever you get will most likely be more personal, better quality, more sustainable and better for our economy!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Honestly, I think most people don’t realize that being creative really comes down to work ethic and perseverance. Most of the successful creatives we see on social media and compare ourselves to are constantly practicing, experimenting, and putting in the time to master their craft. Even after someone has mastered a creative skill they also need to market and sell that work, and continue making new things to keep customers coming back. It’s practically a never ending to-do list, and we just keep going! So even if you don’t personally like or resonate with that work, you can still appreciate all the effort that person has put into their creative process and work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.roamingplanchette.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roaming_planchette/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-roesner2022/

Image Credits
Roaming Planchette