How I went from a hobby besides my PhD to artist in the past 6 years...

May 2024 marks my 6-year ink-aversary and I thought it be fun to take you along on my alcohol ink journey!

I took a deep dive into my Instagram grid and will share some of my very early work with you and how I got where I am today. I personally love reading those stories, so I thought it be fun to share my story with you. 

Never would I have thought buying my first alcohol inks in 2018 that 6 years later I’d be doing this as a job, selling my art and teaching my courses to people from all over the world. To paint you a picture (pun intended): At the time I was pursuing my PhD in a 4-year research project and preparing for an academic career. So, how did that happen?

Let’s dive in already!

When it all started…

2018 – My first ‘attempt’

I discovered alcohol inks through the Instagram from the lovely Marissa (@astuaryart) and immediately was obsessed to try this. How did my first attempt go? Well, have a look for yourself! I mean, it doesn’t even look THAT bad now that I see it, but I literally had NO idea what I was doing. I was using way too much ink and it was one sticky mud of inks and blending solution I mixed together with a straw (don’t try that at home). Read the caption and you will recognize the struggle, am I right? It looks SO much easier than it is! It’s something I always repeat to my students, so they don’t get discouraged right away.

I may have created 3 or 4 pieces that year and for the rest they were collecting dust until I had the courage to try again.

2019 – Experimenting and ‘accidentally’ creating roses
It wasn’t until 2019 I started getting into alcohol inks more seriously. I experimented a lot and I played around on ceramic tiles so I could just wipe them clean and rework the inks over and over again (this is a great beginner tip). Playing with the alcohol inks was a huge stress releaser for me while I was obtaining my PhD. Being very analytical by day, working with alcohol inks was the perfect outlet to release stress, since it was the exact opposite of my day job: going with the flow and just being entirely focused on the process of creating.

Fun fact: During one of those sessions, I accidentally created something that looked like a rose and I was eager to try more. So, my most signature technique actually happened by accident, one very happy accident to put it in Bob Ross terms 😉.

It took a lot of failures (so important for the learning process), but I started to get a better feel on how to intentionally manipulate the inks to get certain results. Here you can already see some of the basic techniques I still use to this date.

2020 – Starting my Etsy shop and live workshops

Well, we all remember 2020 as it marked the start of the Covid epidemic. The positive side was that there was SO much more time to get creative. Some highlights from that year:

• I opened up my Etsy shop to occasionally sell some of my artworks and coasters
• I hit 10K followers on Instagram – a bit of a milestone (although nothing actually happens when you hit that number)
• I gave my first online workshops together with Ami (@art_by_ami_), teaching my roses technique
• I obtained my PhD after 4 years of hard work – and one of my artworks was featured on my cover!

I think it was the year I first started to realize I could at least partly make a living from my art, and having a creative career had always been my secret dream. Not so much I dared to dive in fulltime, but it was more of a side hustle besides my fulltime job at University.  

P.S., since my PhD topic was Augmented Reality, I made a cover that could be scanned in Instagram and would make the art come to life. See it in action here, pretty cool right! 

2021 was a year of highs and lows for me!

On the positive side, I did a lot of cool stuff: I officially registered ‘Anne Roos Art’ as a company, I released my first ever online course teaching my signature roses. The course has been there for the past 3 years and still is very popular to this date! I also launched my personal website to replace my Etsy shop and I even had a little moment in a Dutch TV program showing my art.

On the negative side, it was also the year I got chronically ill with Long Covid and I won’t go into the details here, but it did give me a lot of limitations regarding my energy that are still prevalent today and are partly responsible to where I am today.

2022 – The year I quit my academic career and focused on my art and health

Struggling with chronic fatigue, keeping up my job as an academic teacher and researcher, it was all too much. I decided I needed to leave my job at the University to focus on my health and my art. It was a tough decision, but in the end it’s been a very good decision for me personally. When you have limited energy, you really learn to spend it on the things that matter to you most, and for me that was, amongst others, my art. Weirdly, I am partly thankful for getting chronically ill as otherwise I may not have made the jump to do art as my main job as quickly. And I haven’t regretted that decision for one single second!

This is the year I developed a lot of new floral styles for my Floral Membership tutorials – now covered in my course Alcohol Ink Florals Part 1 and Part 2.

2023 – My first year as a ‘fulltime’ parttime artist

2023 was my first full year as a ‘fulltime’ parttime artist, by which I mean my art business is my only job, but I can only work parttime hours (my energy can really fluctuate by the day, week, and month). The good news is, there’s a lot to achieve also working parttime hours and it’s been my best year so far! Both my health and my art business are going better and better and I am proud of where I got today.

It’s the year I started to work more strategically on my art business in making a stable income from both selling my work and my online courses. It’s difficult dividing the time between these two, and my biggest focus was my online courses.

It was also the year I had my very first exposition at a beautiful location, one of the highlights of the year!

2024 – what’s next?

I am continuing the road from 2023, releasing more online courses and I have just started releasing small art collections, something I hadn’t really done before.

I’m also venturing into new media (textured florals), and it feels like I felt starting alcohol inks all over again. It’s exciting and scary at the same time!

And as I shared in one of my previous newsletters, I am moving places and will have a new in-house studio in the house we bought in The Hague, next to a lovely garden with a big Cherry Blossom tree (what else?).

I’m excited for what’s to come!

Tell me, what kind of art or online courses would you love to see?