Art Licensing Interview with Joan Beiriger

Last week artist Alex Colombo posted a interview with me on her blog "the moon from my attic." I discuss how I got started in art licensing, how long I have been licensing, my inspirations, what manufacturers are looking for, advice on doing trade shows, etc. Below is an excerpt.

The Moon from My Attic: Please introduce yourself - 
 I am Joan Beiriger and I design art for products although I did not start my career as an artist. I have a BS degree in geology and worked as a chemist at a national laboratory until 2002. During that time, I tried all sorts of crafts from wood and stone carving to various needlearts such as needlepoint, quilting, and blackwork. I am a great believer that anyone can learn to do anything if they try. I discovered counted cross-stitch in the mid 1980s and decided to design my own charts when I could not find designs that I wanted to stitch. That led into a business of selling my designs to magazines, to kit manufacturers (licensing was not an option then), and my own mail order business. By the late 1990s, I was searching for another way to express my creativity when I heard a presentation about art licensing by Suzy Spafford (Suzy's Zoo) at a Society of Craft Designers seminar. So I taught myself to paint via instruction books and started my quest in researching the art licensing industry by going to the 1999 Licensing Show in New York.

TMFMA: What's exciting about your creative work?
I love to brainstorm about new concepts and create new art collections that I hope manufacturers will license for their products and consumers will buy. An extension to creating art is learning about the business side of licensing art. The whole process is challenging and learning information about the industry is fascinating. Sharing information via my blog and networking with others interested in art licensing is very rewarding.

TMFMA: What's your favorite medium or tool/s you create with? 
I started painting with acrylics but I now use Adobe Photoshop and sometimes water color washes for backgrounds. I like the freedom that I have when using water colors to create backgrounds but I like the control I have when painting images digitally. I use many layers in Photoshop which makes it easy to edit my art to manufacturer specifications. Besides using Photoshop, I use Adobe Illustrator and Corel Painter to create various effects that I include in my work.

To read the entire interview, go to "A Chemistry for Licensing Art - An Interview with Joan Beiriger."