What is your creative superpower?
The thing that gives you genuine joy in the doing, not just the approval afterward.
Do you have a chorus of shoulds chattering in your mind, telling you that you ought to be making one kind of work instead of another? Are those voices motivated by the glitter of superficial rewards, things that have little to do with the deeper satisfaction of actually creating? Is there a belief that if you follow the latest style, trend, or fashionable subject matter, commercial success will finally arrive? Or do these expectations come from earlier childhood messages of other people’s ideas of who you should be?
What old, unexamined biases might be keeping you from making your most authentic work?
Let me say this gently: your authentic work will always be your most rewarding work. Your real voice is what makes you distinctive. It’s what separates you from the crowd and what ultimately gets noticed. When you allow yourself to relax into who you truly are, that’s when your work becomes magnetic to art buyers, art directors, and collectors alike. Realness sells. Let yourself be seen.
People aren’t just buying art. They’re buying a piece of you. Yes, they respond to how the work makes them feel, but they’re also responding to connection. As the artist, you’re forming a quiet, human exchange with each viewer. Your work fills a need for resonance and shared experience. The buyer doesn’t just “get you”, they feel recognized by you.
If you sell your work online or directly to collectors, you’ve likely been told that you need to produce certain things to sell more, fit a seasonal trend, or stay relevant. But one can outgrow a gilded cage. Predictable, vanilla work may be marketable, but will it sustain you? Will it nourish your curiosity or your spirit over time? There’s a deeper satisfaction in being paid for work that comes straight from your heart and mind, work you are fully committed to.
More than a decade ago, I fell under the spell of the art shoulds. I convinced myself that if I moved into the fantasy genre, I could earn more money and gain more status. So I made a conscious decision to shift my practice and focus intensely on learning the human figure. The high fantasy market was perceived as more serious and more lucrative than the children’s or educational illustration work I had been doing. More money. More legitimacy. I have to wonder now: who was I trying to prove something to?
For six years, I ran a weekly community figure drawing session at a local college, three hours at a time. I produced hundreds of drawings and painted studies. My goal was to internalize the figure so completely that I could draw it from any angle, in any pose, without reference. The discipline was gratifying, and I genuinely enjoyed the observational work. I was deeply invested in the shift, attending graduate school and building a thesis centered on fairytales and folk stories, and how those stories eventually solidify into cultural law. It was an intellectually rich period.
But the botanical work kept returning.
Plants, animals, and insects began slipping back into my images, first quietly, then insistently. I was still receiving botanical commissions from long-standing freelance clients, and the more those natural forms appeared in my fantasy work, the harder it became to deny what was happening. I had to accept that the living Earth is a deep and central force in my art-making. Embracing that truth wasn’t a narrowing of my practice, it was a homecoming.
Does that mean I’ll never make work involving the human figure again? Of course not. It simply means that the natural world is a primary language in my work, and resisting it was costing me energy and clarity.
Today, I feel more grounded in my footing as a fine artist. My work moves comfortably across different illustration markets, including fantasy, without me pretending to be someone I’m not. I’ve found a consistent voice, and I’m not afraid to let it evolve. This career has taken many unexpected turns over the last thirty years, and I hope for many more ahead, guided less by shoulds and more by curiosity, honesty, and devotion to the work itself.
~K2
"If you're not being appreciated for who you are, you're only being tolerated for who you're not." ~ Simone Grace Seol.
Dec 2025 Author’s note:
I realize now that fantasy has always been part of my visual language, though not in the traditional high-fantasy sense. While I’ve created dragons and mythic figures over the years, the fantastical in my work has always grown out of the natural world with symbolism and a focus on transformation. For me, fantasy isn’t a costume my work wears or an escape from reality; it’s a strategy for revealing the strangeness and magic already present in the everyday world.