We were lucky to catch up with Paul and Roxann Lizardi recently and have shared our conversation below.

Paul and Roxann, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Roxann: Learning new techniques is incredibly engaging and it’s such an important part of what makes me love what I do! Most of my ideas come from just playing around with materials and techniques. Trying something difficult, failing at it, continuing to work on the failure to see what else it could be, dissecting what went wrong and ultimately just repeating all of that with an open mind has been my most essential practice. As far as obstacles I think a lot of them were mental. I wanted to be immediately good at something, not realizing it’s often necessary to fail in order to learn and grow and I would let that frustration hold me back. I have found my most valuable tool is just having a more experimental mindset when learning a new technique. This learning process never ends, it’s what drew me into a creative business in the first place and always reaching for new skills is what continues to keep me obsessed with making things!

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

We are Paul and Roxann Lizardi, a husband and wife team working together in our home studio handcrafting sterling silver jewelry. Our business is called Lizardi Jewelry and we’ve been doing this full time for 17 years now! We are self taught, we started by learning how to make beaded and wire wrapped jewelry and we eventually worked our way to learning silversmithing and soldering. We have worked hard to grow our skills because we are just both so invested and obsessed with what we do, it’s really a dream come true that we get to do this for a living!

We spent the first 7 years in business with brick and mortar stores, opening up in two different malls during that time which gave us the opportunity to directly interact with our customers and see their reactions to our creations. Through this we learned the importance of function and quality, how important it is for things to wear well, be comfortable and stand the test of time. We now use Argentium Sterling Silver in all of our designs as it has a higher pure silver content and resists tarnish while also being hypoallergenic and nickel free. Little things like that set our designs apart and I think that this is what keeps our customers coming back as the quality becomes even more apparent over time.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Roxann : I feel like people who don’t consider themselves creative will have this idea that they don’t make art because they aren’t good at it, that they don’t possess some natural talent or aptitude for creativity. I think anyone can learn to do anything just by being curious and putting in the time to learn how. To become good at something doesn’t have to include natural talent, just spend time being bad at it and keep doing it anyway!

Paul :Another thing people don’t understand about a creative business, or any small business really, is how many other aspects and tasks are involved in being successful at it. Creating something that someone wants is important but when it’s done you need to know how to get it in front of that person. Making art can be extremely rewarding. It feels great to make something that you are proud of, but it can feel soul crushing when it feels that no one sees it. I think it’s important that you are willing to put as much time into learning your business as you did learning your craft. That’s easier said than done because you are not going to love learning search engine optimization, product photography or book keeping the way you love picking up a brush, hammer or whatever tools you create with, but those are the skills that will help you find an audience for your art.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Roxann : So I don’t have a specific book to recommend but I would say that you should just read everything! I am constantly inspired by books and I read as much as I can about art, crafts, design theory or just anything at all that seems interesting. Last week I read a pretty in depth book about how to draw birds even though I have absolutely no desire or reason to draw birds.. I like being reminded that everything has an element of learning and practice to it and I find it fascinating to learn the process of something new. I’m always looking for inspiration in books and other crafts, you never know what you’ll learn or how it might apply to what you do.

Paul :I have a much shorter attention span than Roxann, so Youtube is definitely my go to resource. No one specific page but as soon as I get curious about a technique, new tool or piece of equipment, I am searching for videos about it. Regardless of what you want to learn you can find it there. Not all of it is useful but if you dig you can usually get some good info.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lizardijewelry.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizardijewelry/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizardiJewelry/