Meet Elizabeth Schmehl

We recently connected with Elizabeth Schmehl and have shared our conversation below.

Elizabeth, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

My passion and love of my artwork and the difference variety of art and design and my background in working in Business Administration just what I get out of it gives me drive and confidence to keep going. I think you have to love what you are doing to make you resilient, you get knocked down and you get back up and keep going and working on your craft and making it happen. The tough times makes you are stronger person personally and makes you stronger in your business journey as well. You’re always working towards making your business model more efficient and sustainable, inspiring and more appealing to people and to everyone in a global audience and economy. Specially if your business model is solely based online like mind is, the art is creative freedom and ideas, which means influence are driving your passion but you still have to make it your own style and using your own ideas and creativity of colour and the best objective or whatever is telling the story in your art, doesn’t matter if it’s on paper, or on digital art it’s the same, through photography image editing, filters, AI filters, Image blending with AI, AI art style it’s still your own. Make yourself resilient from negative comments online about AI art style about stealing other people’s art is absolutely not true, AI art is made up by written words in a prompt and asking AI to generate it, the end result varies greatly and takes allot of word manipulation to get what you want and some different variations to get to the finish artwork that gets published and shown. It’s allot of hours and sometimes days to get it right. So resiliency in all forms and education of people about artificial intelligence art needs to happen, as trolling online is not something that is positive or give someone else feedback when these people have really no idea what they are talking about.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am a graphic digital artists who makes art using digital tools like raw images editing, filters, AI filters, collage art, Image blending, image manipulation and AI art which I sell on merchandise online.
I started the micro online business with print to demand providers in February last year, after selling my art to my family and friends for a year which gave me the idea to turn it into a business. I worked professionally as a business administration roles for over 22 years before opening my business but a change of health circumstances made me realise that I couldn’t work in the position that I was doing well enough for my job. I have a chronic back injury that affects me greatly everyday with nerve pain from two pinched nerves in my spine with degenerative discs and 4 bunge discs which as compromised my back muscles and my back and pain caused can keep me from doing everyday activities, I stuff from chronic pain everyday. My injury allows me to only sit, walk and stand for short periods of time otherwise the pain is unbearable to put it mildly. So my business gives me the independence and flexibility and income to keep my business going and financial stability which is what I am currently working towards.

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?

Everyone has their own journey in life, work, and business and creativity. My creativity came to be later on in life after a tough time in my life. Turning a creative art form into something positive and inspiring as well that I enjoyed doing. You have to enjoy what you are doing, learning how to create digital art content of Fanfiction is a skill I had to learn, and I taught myself by trail and error, and finding the right software for yourself is the key. Starting small like doing collage-art, to start with, once you think that’s enough or you want to experiment with other forms of creativity with filters, using Prisma, Photolab filters, and then working up into image manipulation and blending with Photolab then using image blending with AI using Photolab and filters, I taught myself, so willing to experiment and learn and having an idea getting it turn out right! It’s amazing achievement. And time, patience etc.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

There support overall even though my father, didn’t quite understand the concept of a micro online business and what it meant, as my father is old school about business and marketing everything had to be physical like a physical shop in the Main Street to be a business, and marketing was printed on paper and put in paper newspapers and magazines including flyers. My mother was more supportive and could understand online business side and social media marketing roles including digital advertising and flyers etc. My parents have been supportive with buying products from my online businesses and using them as models for my business with wearing them down the street etc. Just having them pushing me forward and being their and reminding me why I started my business for, etc.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Image credits: The Studio 2660, Studio 2660, Liz Schmehl’s Art and Schmehl family collection.

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