Duration: Six years. 

Location: Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Education: Associate degree in visual art and design from Salt Lake Community College. 

Career path: I started dabbling in lettering in college—not counting my high school notebooks full of “lettered” emo lyrics. My style developed during my first job at the hobby store American Crafts. My job let me try a ton of different illustration and lettering styles, so naturally I did personal and freelance work during my time there. Through freelancing, I landed a dream job at the creative agency Struck, where I was able to further explore illustration and lettering with awesome client projects. When I had my son, I decided to freelance full time from home with representation by Snyder New York. I’m continuing to play, explore and hone my crafts. 

Artistic influences: Having grown up in the Utah mountains, I am most inspired by the outdoors and creating things by hand. And my heart explodes for beautiful old things. Like most designers, I hoard glorious antique and vintage resources all over my studio—piles of packaging, embroidered handkerchiefs, gorgeous tins and beautiful old books. They just don’t make beautiful things like they used to!  

Favorite projects: My floral alphabet will always be my baby. Although I created it years ago, I still consider it a turning point in my career. It was an absolute joy to create a project that combined lettering, illustration and nature. I’m super proud of the murals I’ve had the opportunity to work on. Murals always provide interesting logistical problems that make the end results super rewarding. I created my first big mural for Lululemon Athletica on an eighteen-foot brick wall within a retail store. To solve the problem of getting it onto the wall, I broke the design into parts and used a projector to paint my design. The Sugar House mural, for the neighborhood of the same name in Salt Lake City, presented another huge challenge: how to create a large-scale painting outside during a rainy time of year. I projected it onto the wall at night, and then used a scissor lift to paint it. The flippin’ rain washed a portion of the fresh paint away at one point, and I had to go back and repaint. It was so frustrating—but so rewarding—to overcome these challenges and do what I love. 

Currently, I’m almost done embarking on an illustrated series of all the official state flowers of the United States. It’s a personal project that I absolutely revel in, and I share my progress on my Instagram—follow along if you like! 

Aspirations: It’s honestly hard for me to think five to ten years ahead, since my interests change so often! At the moment, I just want to draw flowers and script lettering, and make embroideries and cyanotypes all day long, create woodworking projects and illustrate my own limited-color palette, nature-inspired children’s books. So, if I could figure out a way to make money from—and make time for—all of that in the next five to ten years, that would be ideal! 

Philosophy: Keep learning, growing and exploring—in work and in life. I’ve always been a little tea-drinking, tree-climbing, embroidering grandma, but my passion to learn will never let me stagnate.