Hi I am Jesse Huxleigh and I want to use my skills as a designer, illustrator, painter and digital artist to see if I can build an online business selling my paintings as print on demand products. This will be warts and all – full disclosure of the process. I will lead you through a step by step process with all the fails and learnings along the way. I have no experience in this but I want to see if it is possible. I love painting so the worst thing that is going to happen is I am going to have a lot of digital paintings on my iPad that my just sit there. However I aim to show you my entire process – including my painting process as scattered and random as it may be.
I just love painting frick’n clouds! I love, love, love painting clouds, when I lived in London I used to love going to the galleries but the images that always resonated with me were paintings that had epic cloudscapes – like Turner and Constable et al.
My Background
Well I have been drawing since I can remember, I remember winning a poster competition when I was six years of age for a local bank, I was told to go to the headmasters office to collect a voucher (now I was six years of age and had no idea whatsoever what a voucher was – was it a sculpture of a golden eagle in bronze I thought? Well I was too scared to go to the headmasters office so can’t remember ever getting the voucher – well that’s what I remember. From the age of five my favourite books were on the Renaissance, there was one book in particular about Leonardo da Vinci that I particularly loved especially his drawings of horses, so I would copy them.
I had a turbulent relationship with the art teacher in high school, she created art out of dolls heads (not exactly my cup of tea Renaissance they were not). So being a teenager I rebelled and I think I may have even failed art in high school. But I would sketch on the covers of my text books and one of my friends said hey your really good you should be a graphic designer. I had no idea what that was but it planted the seed for my adult life.
After leaving high school I went to a training course in Foundation of Graphic Design, I then did a year course in Production for Graphic Design, followed by a three year degree in Graphic Design. What a blast – best years of my life. After leaving University I started my own graphic design business called Inner City Design, this lasted a measly two years – I had no idea how to price my work properly so ended up working for free to get exciting jobs whilst not charging enough for my bread and butter work.
I will skip the next 20 years because I feel you getting bored. So in 2010 I started a website promoting artists work online, giving artists a platform to show their work online – as the internet was still relatively new and I felt I could build a website to help artists. It was a flop, the intentions were good I just didn’t have the knowledge to launch something so ambitious. I did however post some of my work there and I did sell a couple of my paintings but not through the website.
So this is it Day 1. It all begins.
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