Meet Dana Duncan

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dana Duncan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dana below.

Dana, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I found my purpose in life is split between helping others achieve their artistic goals and my own form of personal creativity.

Helping others was something that just came naturally to me. I was flipping through my family album at my parent’s house one day and found a picture of me teaching another kid in pre-school how to do the ABCs. So even at a young age I was already helping others. Once I learn something, it seems becomes my goal to teach it to others who want to learn it.

I am a professor now, and my educational goal is to help artistic students find their digital voice. Using tech is hard for a lot of creatives, and software is very left brained I might add. So using software to create digital art can be quite a challenge. I find using tech easy! I pick it up quickly and have the ability to get to the root of ideas fast and then explain them. So this natural ability turned into becoming a teacher immediately after I graduated from ArtCenter College of Design. I was asked to teach right after I graduated, taking over a class for a professor who was taking a sabbatical. I ended up re-writing that class and starting a whole trend with new viewpoints of digital education. I luckily found my true calling at a young age and have been keeping it up ever since.

But I found that I was always helping others and not doing enough for myself. So I started to get back into making my own art. After a divorce, and finding my seemingly perfect life was not turning out to what I thought it was supposed to be, I had to go on a soul searching journey! I had to get to the root of why I was so dissatisfied with my life at the time. And it turned out that I was always being a “good girl” and putting the needs of others ahead of me. After some meditation and self help therapy I started to see the light!

I began by taking down my graphic design web site, firing all of my clients, and not accepting any new work. I just stopped doing the corporate thing. I had spent over 20 years freelancing as a graphic designer, making other people businesses happen through branding and design. I was always, again, helping others to make their dream happen. But what about my dreams?

I took a break from graphic design and traveled to places on my bucket list, took art classes, engaged with new friends, immersed myself in a bunch of creative opportunities that were less structured than design. I just started living my life finally. After showing some art in galleries and trying a bunch of new styles and techniques I started sketching cats in my sketchbook. One day a friend saw my cats and said “I would totally buy those if they were on products!” And that was how Pink Owlet got started.

That was the beginning of my journey! I indeed made them into products. I used my skills as a branding designer to create my own small business (my friends call it the cat empire) and started vending at shows and conferences. I started at DesignerCon and it just took off. Then I found that the cat community loved my art, so I started vending at more cat-centric shows. Hello CatCon! It turns out cat people are my people. So now I am continuously making new art about cats. I explore new types of products and new ways to make merchandise, and to make people smile with my art. I discovered pattern and surface design and now I have an apparel line. I still make all of the standard merch like stickers, enamel pins, and other stationery goods too. Hello cat ladies and cat daddies! I found my niche, my happiness, and my journey lead to me making art that make me and others happy at the same time!

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am currently focused on continuing my artistic career as a small business owner. I am in a constant state of creating! I work in my home studio, making artwork weekly to be turned into into all kinds of products. I am not focused om trying to grow my business larger either. I like it small! Since it is my “side hustle” and I have a day job as a college professor, I can manage it by myself and create when I feel like it. If I need to take a weekend off, I can! But if I get into a frenzy of creative ideas I can be very productive and make a bunch of new designs for my both and online store.

I am always making stickers in my studio. Designing them in Adobe Illustrator, printing them out, and cutting them with. My cutting machine. I love this workflow because I can make products faster and have them ready for people to buy as soon as I show them in my social media. I mostly use instagram www.instagram.com/pink.owlet and I post a lot of process videos in my TikTok @PinkOwletArt

At the moment I am focused on creating pattern and surface design for apparel licensing. You can see my portfolio at www.danaduncandesign.com where I have a collection of my pattern designs. I design a lot of cute dresses for my online store and also bring limited series designs to my shows. I also make patterned button-up shirts. Those are the most popular products at my shows. I often sell out of designs at a show. But I am off make new ones all the time so people know to get it at the show or it may not be back again! I have a special section on my web site where people can order my apparel products with their choice of one of my hundreds of pattern designs! https://www.pinkowlet.com/custom. In addition, I am licensing my designs to larger retailers! I have a collaboration now with Hot Topic and have released two t-shirt designs in their stores. I am super excited about this because my cat art can now reach an even larger audience!

I have two shows coming up in November, the Jackalope Art Fair in Pasadena and the Costa Mesa Cat Extravaganza, and one show in December, the Jackalope Art Fair in Burbank. I will be vending at those shows with a full range of all of my products. Come on by and you can see me and my art in-person!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The three most impactful skills in my personal journey are creativity, curiosity, and self reliance.

Being an artist, the creativity comes naturally for me. I foster it with inspiration and grow it by being inspired by observing. I watch people and animals around me. I am always feeling inspiration from the world. Just sitting with a cup of tea and a book, then realizing that other people like that too inspires me to make art about it. It is a constant circle of input and output for me. It all starts with the creativity.

Curiosity! I am a go getter and I figure stuff out on my own. If I do not know something, I figure it out. Learning new techniques is part of the puzzle of creativity. Always keep learning.

Self reliance had taught me to be responsible for myself, not depend on others for expectations that may not be met, or wait around for other people to “help” me make decisions. In the past, I even had a lot of (negative) people telling me not to do things, and even told me that I would not be able to sell my art, and to give it up. Well, I did not listen to them! (They are not in my friend circle anymore either.) Instead, I struck out on my own and made art that I love, and sure enough the message was universal and I discovered that others also appreciated my art.

Just taking that first step towards creating my art involved trying to build a lot of personal confidence. In the beginning, I did not have that confidence either. I had to learn it. I had to learn to trust myself, my artistic eye. In college, critique was brutal and if your work did not reach a certain level or perfection, then teachers and classmates would give harsh feedback. It led to me developing a stressful mindset that everything I created was not good enough. If something did not reach a level of perfection in design I was not able to show it to the world. But I learned that there is a world outside of the designers world, and the rest of the world does not care if it is perfect! All that perfection was holding me back. I learned that it is OK to make something not prefect, and that my audience will get the message. So my biggest advice is take the steps to learn to accept yourself and appreciate your art.

Another part of self reliance was to learn to stop paying attention to negativity around me about financial risks Yes, we must be practical with approaching launching a small business. But risks are part of the pathway to personal fulfillment. You will never know if you do not try. Of course, you need to make a starting budget, what can you afford to risk for the adventure that will not put you out. Then consider that investment as gone, you will not get it back, and you will not be disappointed when you do not make a bunch of money at your fist show or web site launch. Just see it as the cost of starting up. But if you keep trying you will earn it back, and more in the long run. A lot of small business is about understanding the finances you have to risk and planning for the long haul.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

Most of the challenges I am facing for my creative business nowadays are things that are out of my control. Evolving social media and AI Art. The algorithms of social media are always changing, and it is challenging to keep up with them. It is not like I want to be doing a bunch of dances on TikTok just for people to see my art. One joke my artist friends and I talk about is that someone can post a picture of their cat and get 1000 likes in a day, while we create whole art piece that took days, and we get two likes. I have to say that is is hard to get your artwork seen in the environment of social media. I have learned to just get over the stress of social media and post purposeful content of what I am creating. Not depend on the likes. And just see it as a way for my audience to keep up with what I am creating.

The whole AI art thing scares me for the future of creatives everywhere. I am seeing big corporations literally jumping on that bandwagon. I am seeing advertising about using AI assistants for design, logos, illustration, and art. Initially I thought that maybe only small businesses owners and individuals, who could not afford or maybe did not want to invest for these creative services, would be the ones using it. But nope. It is encroaching everywhere! It is even taking over in software that creative are supposed to be using. Big corporation claim it makes things easier, but it is slowly going to affect the jobs in the creative market. I do not even know what to do about this one. I feel that big businesses are going to do whatever makes them the most money and the integrity of hiring a professional creative may not be important to them at all.

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