Meet KatieLynne Jackson

We recently connected with KatieLynne Jackson and have shared our conversation below.

KatieLynne, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

Things just come to me, and I act on them. The song a day wasn’t started because of online trends (I discovered later after starting that this was a ‘thing’), I just decided one day “hmmm, let’s try singing online every day, that’ll be fun!” which is why it started on a more or less random day in the middle of the year rather than at the start of the year or a month. With my art, “oohh, oohh, this is a cool idea, let’s make it”, and suddenly we have a patchwork book cover or something. Or I’ll see something that inspires me, a photo of a chainmaille dragon online. No idea how they made it, but it looks cool, let’s take a swing at it! And that became a thing, and I’ve now made 75 someodd dragons that come with adoption scrolls, with different personalities and likes. I’ve always more or less been that way, I think stemming from having grown up in alternatively the middle of a field or the middle of a forest. There’s nothing out there to distract you, so when an idea comes on, you just… act on it.

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?

My focus is more or less to entertain, to make people smile. That’s what I want to bring to others, making them happy 😃

My art, while somewhat random (different mediums, different subjects, whatever comes to mind), is just bringing my imagination to life, and generally just making something that looks “cool”. But that’s what wakes me up in the morning, that’s what excites me the most. Oohh, oohh, here’s a cool idea, let’s plot it up in my head, more or less have the thing 3/4s designed in my mind before I even start putting the physical pieces together. Some ideas might sit benched for months or years, waiting for the right opportunity, the right tools, or materials to come along, and then suddenly, things start happening.

My favourite part of all of this is being surrounded by my tools and supplies. I usually have about three projects on the go at any given time, and will work on one, then when my hands or the specific muscles for it are tired, I’ll move onto another one, and kinda rotate between them all, working on one, then working on another, and none of the tools or supplies stays in place for very long. It seems I’ll pick up a tool, do something with it, put it down in a slightly different place, and we have what I like to call this nest of art supplies and projects surrounding me, in a constantly rotating tornado of movement and activity. And then, amidst the chaos, suddenly one of the projects is finished, and I’ll post it online and on my website, look at it for a bit, and set it with the other things to put in my display booth when I open at faires and events and the like. My shop, currently named Wizards and Zounds (wizardsandzounds.com currently points to a temporary page within my main website, zebeth.co.uk, but will one day show my digital shop front), has not yet opened in England, I’m still settling down in here, and rebuilding my stock of dragons and other miscellanea while checking out craft faires to see how things work on this side of the ocean. It’s interesting times for me these days, and you can keep up with the random goings-on through my song-a-day (2540 days and still going strong) on YouTube @katielynne, and also linked at the top of Zebeth.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three most useful qualities I suppose, coming from someone that didn’t grow up around people (more detailed story to all that available lol), is don’t get distracted, act on your ideas immediately, and keep a pen and notepad beside the bed.

And this is the big one, that notepad. You know those *amazing* ideas you have riiiiiight as you’re on the brink of sleep? You force yourself to wake up and you jot that down, that stuff is GOLD, and you want to collect it. You might get up 5 times before you fall asleep, you might get 2 hours of sleep that night, but morning you will thank you, later you will be absolutely ecstatic that you got that idea down fresh, and have a plan.

Again, that pen and notepad (or cellphone equivalent notepad app) is GOLD. You might not write anything down for weeks, or months, but you have that discipline to wake yourself up when the mind percolates that incredible idea!

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?

Step back for a bit, and do something else. If you hit a roadblock, beat yourself against it for a bit if you need, but don’t be afraid to move onto something else for a while. Know that the back of your mind is working on the problem, and at some point or another, it’s gonna tell you what it needs to overcome this roadblock (you might need an additional tool, or another supply), or you’ll be randomly walking down an aisle of a store, and your mind will be all “That! There! That will solve this problem!”, and maybe it will, and maybe it’ll only partially do a crude job of it, but now the front of your mind is looking at it, and developing THAT into the next step, how can THAT be improved to do a better job, and you might get that thing, or you might draw or write it down (good ol’ notepad and pen, a voice recorder is often useful too), and either cobble together some tool that does the job, or know to look for something specific online, and then things are moving.

And don’t be afraid of cobbling things together out of random scrap and bits of string or sticks, I can’t even count how many times I’ve dug through my trash for pieces of cardboard, or collected fallen branches, and some absolutely jumbled together conglomeration of tape, string, and other bits of material are holding something together. But it’s a tool that only needs to work once, more tape fixes everything, and yknow, you can always (hopefully) scrape that last layer of attempt off and try it again, or start over. I’ve found that this cobbling together usually happens near the start of projects, and when you’re further along things are more refined and less held together by bits of tape.

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KatieLynne Jackson

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