Art with Heart: Is Creativity Your Calling?

Sophie is an illustrator, writer, health and skincare enthusiast, and mum. She is also training for her first marathon next April!

In 2012, I’d reached a crossroads in my working life; I’d been working freelance in the Television Industry in London since completing my degree - I’d worked on some really fun projects, and felt like I was on a path that was going to take me through the bulk of my working life. When my eldest daughter was born in the April of that year, it quickly became clear that the freelancing world wasn’t set up to support women in the telly industry and my naive and not-very-well-thought-through idea of taking a baby to a TV shoot strapped to my back in some sort of papoose probably wasn’t going to work… and to be honest, that left me feeling kind of, well, stumped.

I wasn’t sure what to do, and was worried about how I was going to go back to work, and what I was even qualified for - despite my degree and work experience, the television industry is quite niche, and whilst my skills and experience were probably transferable in some capacity, I quickly felt out of the loop and adrift in an unfamiliar sea.

One Friday evening, when my daughter was still only a few months old, we went food shopping at a local supermarket, and I spent some of the very little spare money we had on a cheap drawing pad, some coloured pens and a few pencils. I hadn’t done any artwork since my teens, but I had a sudden, irrepressible urge to do something creative; I wanted to write and illustrate a children’s book.

I set to work, and spent my daughter’s nap times drawing, losing myself and my worries in the process. My drawing skills were rusty but jotting down ideas and scribbles gave my days a focus beyond the breastfeeding, endless laundry and my new identity as ‘mum’. I loved it, and when we left London and moved to Belper, I decided to take my newfound creative passion further and went to The University of Derby to study for my Masters Degree in Illustration. Being in that creative sphere for a year was a very happy place to be, and I went on to set up my business (Duck & Peach Illustration) in 2015, feeling confident and excited about the journey ahead.

Now, if you’re a parent and you’ve ever tried to run a small business, creative or otherwise, then kudos to you; it’s a lot. You wear all the hats 24/7 – the making and designing, the social media, the accounting, customer service, ordering and paying for stock, working weekends at events and fairs to publicise yourself and your business… When I embarked on my creative journey, I had no idea of what it was going to entail, and for seven years my business was fuelled by my passion for creating and sharing my work and, well, just a lot of late nights and hard work!

I had stockists around the UK, a website where I sold my work, took commissions and eventually had a little shop in Belper for nearly two years. On paper, my small creative business was doing well.

Sadly, the post-pandemic cost of living crisis and rising price tags on just about everything meant I was unable turn over enough cash in my shop to keep paying for stock to be printed. It was a blow after all the hard work I’d put in, but so many businesses were suffering and the high street had been struggling for years. Until something more sustainable came along for me to be able to offer my work to customers, I had no choice but to call it a day. Whilst a part of me was sad about it, another very unexpected feeling manifested from the shop’s closure: relief. I’d completely run out of steam trying to be everything for everyone all of the time. My business had cost me so much in terms of the hours spent running it and doing whatever I could to try and make it work; sacrificing time with my family to do another order for a customer, or putting together another box of stock for an upcoming event - not to mention that the actual cost of ordering stock became unmanageable. I’d invested in a huge, expensive printer to print my art prints and greetings cards, but the inks for it were so expensive… and after a lot of trial and error I realised that really, print is better done by people who know what they’re doing!

A year or so after closing my shop, I got a job at 45 Degrees in Belper where a new company was being set up: Arti. Arti’s initial aim was to provide UK-based artists with an online platform to sell their artwork at the highest quality without the need for expensive websites or the ever-increasing upfront production costs – a perfect antidote to the struggles I’d faced in my own business, and the opportunity for so many artists not to have to face those same challenges!

Arti fulfils artists’ orders and we ship them directly to their customers, leaving our artists more time for the fun stuff – making art! If this had been available to me in the early days of Duck & Peach, I’d have saved myself a lot of money and A LOT of mistakes ordering stock that didn’t sell, or worse yet, not having enough of the stock that did sell. You live and learn!

We launched in November 2023, and since then our plans have really grown – we’re hoping to move to new premises soon, which will enable us to open a small art gallery for our Arti artists’ work to be displayed, as well as have a space to put on events and eventually workshops too. We’ve been granted CIC status which means that we’re now a Community Interest Company and can apply for funding and grants to benefit our artists and local community in ways we’d only imagined six months ago!

If you’re a parent who creates and you want to be able to sell prints of your work but you feel unsure, or you’re lacking in confidence to get your work “out there”, we really hope that Arti will be helpful resource for you. We’ve got over a hundred artists already using Arti to share and sell their artwork with their own customers – it’s fantastic! If you’d like to find out more, you can message us, or have a look at our social media or website. We’re a friendly bunch and we really want to help make art and creativity more sustainable for artists.

Image 1:

Fiona Thomson - ‘Daisy’

Created using acrylics, oil pastel, pencil & graphite.

Fiona is a Belper-based artist with a passion for gardening who is currently exploring drawing and painting after a number of years of working in embroidery and drawing.

Image 2:

Carol Giaquinto - ‘City Scape 8 - A walk in the park at night’

Created using acrylics, pen and an old credit card.

Carol is a self-taught mixed-media artist based in Belper.

Image 3:

Jenna M Pink - ‘I Wonder Who You Will Be When You Grow Up’

Jenna Michelle Pink is an abstract artist living in Belper, creating contemporary, expressive, colourful artwork.

Image 4:

Karen Johnson aka Millie Moth - ‘Wild Blues and Greens’

Karen is a Derby based artist who creates her vibrant floral artwork using both alcohol inks, and digital collage techniques.

Image 5:

Sophie Cartmell - ‘Ay Up Duck - Flowery Beige’

Sophie is a Belper-based illustrator who’s work is inspired by children’s literature and illustration; she loves creating cute, quirky, colourful little characters.

Image 6:

Ruth Gray - ‘Market Place Belper’

Ruth is a Belper-based painter working in acrylics on board. Ruth has been a painter for over 20 years, teaching, selling paintings and working to commission.

Arti was created to help artists make a living from their passion, focus on their creativity, and get paid fairly for their work.