For years this question made me cringe. Throughout my life, sketching has been an escape or an outlet, certainly never a viable business proposition. I couldn’t’ stand to have my best friends or my family look at my art, let alone let people pay for it.
It took my own clients to show me how wrong I was.
My first job out of college, I was a campus organizer on a shoestring political campaign in Iowa City. Tiny office, strip mall, 14-to-16-hour days. We had no money — which meant no posters, no materials, nothing on the walls.
So I drew them. I pulled paper from our training sessions and sketched by hand: Herky the Hawkeye, chants, whatever made the space feel less like a temporary room and more like somewhere worth being. I did it partly to make myself smile. I noticed it made other people smile too.
But that was all it was. A side thing. It didn’t show up in any metric that mattered.
The Skill That Kept Showing Up Anyway
I moved through my twenties wearing the many hats you wear in nonprofits and political organizations — fundraising, communications, organizing, digital. Sketching followed me everywhere, quietly. When there was time, I’d sketch. When there wasn’t, I wouldn’t. It was never the number I was being measured against.
What I was realizing, underneath all of it, was that I loved the translation work. The one-to-one conversations — hearing what someone actually believed, finding where values met — I loved that. But what I loved even more was taking that and turning it into something one-to-many. How do you make a message that lands for a room full of people? How does design make that sharper, more human, more true?
That instinct was doing something. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
When I Started My Business
When I started Tannic Studio, I picked up a pen and sketched out my first projects the same way I always had. It was just how I thought — a notebook before a screen, always.
And then something happened that genuinely shook me.
People wanted to buy the sketches.
Not the finished website. Not the polished deliverable. The thing in my notebook. Clients would see a prototype sketch and say that — that’s what we want. Can you translate that digitally?
My first instinct was to apologize for it. No, no — this is just a rough. We’ll get professional illustrations. We’ll use stock photography. We’ll bring in someone who actually does this. The idea that my sketches were the product felt almost embarrassing. Like I’d accidentally shown someone something private.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand why I was reacting that way.
What I’d Been Taught to Apologize For
Growing up, we moved around a lot. Sketching helped me make sense of new places and gave me a reason to get outside. If I didn’t have anyone to go with, well, I had a sketchbook and thus a purpose. Sketching helped me feel a little less alone.
My grandmother is an artist and a art teacher – she was responsibel for my set of oil pastels and pencils, she took me to her studio when I visited and let me poke around in the nooks of supplies – it was a treasure shop, a place of creation and wonder. Even with her art adorning our walls, I shared my sketches sheepishly knowing tha tthis was an indulgent practice, it wasn’t real work. The message that art was a side talent, not a career path, started young and stayed strong. Not even my grandma’s workshop could counteract that.
Real work meant numbers and code, as a woman n tech I couldn’t hide behind creativity, I needed to understand technology. I needed to prove that i was worthy. Just like in my political organizing days, I treated art as a side bonus that wasn’t real work. I apologized for it as if it got in the way of the work I should be doing.
The internalized message that art wasn’t as worthy as tech become hardwired into me. I sketched less and coded more and flinched when people pointed at my art. “Whoa, you drew that? You’re pretty talented” No! I’m not, I’m untrained, out of practice and you’re jsut saying that to be nice It’s not real work, I’m not an artist. I ‘m a developer, I’m a technologist, I’m an entrepreneur.
What My Clients Actually Wanted
Here’s what changed it: working on my own templates. Using my own illustrations to tell the story of a site I was designing — not as decoration, but as argument. The sketch and the code making the same point together, just in different languages.
And finding myself in the exact position my clients had been in: realizing the two things weren’t separate. The art is good because the code is good. The code is good because the art is good. Neither one is covering for the other. They’re the same creative intelligence, expressed differently.
My clients weren’t being generous when they said they wanted the sketches. They were being precise. They wanted someone who could hold the visual story and the technical architecture in the same hand — because that’s actually rare, and because websites built that way feel different. They feel like they came from one mind, which is exactly what makes them coherent.
That’s the thing I’d been apologizing for. That was the whole skill.
The Myth of the Single Box
There’s a version of professional identity that insists you have to be one thing. The technologist. The artist. The strategist. Pick a lane.
I spent a long time trying to fit that. I’d lead with the code and minimize the sketching. I’d frame the art as a bonus, a differentiator, a nice-to-have. I kept the two things in separate rooms in my head so no one would think I was confused about what I was.
What I’ve found — building Tannic Studio, working with clients who are often navigating the same tension in their own brands — is that the people doing the most interesting work are almost always the ones who refused the single box. The chef who’s also a historian. The hotel designer who’s also a data person. The food truck owner who built a brand that sits comfortably next to fine dining because she didn’t let anyone tell her those two things couldn’t coexist. (That last one, actually, is the whole premise behind our Bedeviled template — a deviled egg food truck built with the same rigor we bring to luxury properties, because the rigor was never about the price point.)
The brands that stand out are the ones that are unmistakably themselves. And the people who build those brands are usually the ones who stopped apologizing for the parts of themselves that didn’t fit a tidy description.
For What It’s Worth
I still start every project with a pen and paper. The notebook comes before the screen. But I don’t keep those sketches private anymore – I give clients the whole package, I share my messy diagrams on social media to showcase the value of human-powered design.
I’m an artist who codes. I’m a technologist who sketches. I build websites that are technically considered and visually specific because I don’t separate those two things anymore — and haven’t, really, since Iowa City, sitting in that strip mall office drawing Herky the Hawkeye on training session paper just to make the space feel worth being in.
I know what my art is worth now and I know I can call myself an artist, not because I get paid to make art but because my own workshop – my sektchbooks and unnamed illustrator layers and my source files are all part of the same thing I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid playing with brushes and buttons – my own studio. Thanks for coming in.
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