Advice from Artists Who Built Successful Businesses: Leverage Your Art Alumni Roundtable

🎧 Listen to this episode: Apple Podcasts

What do artists who've actually made it look like on the other side? Not the highlight reel — the real version, from people who sat where you're sitting and did the work to get somewhere different.

In this episode of the Art + Audience podcast, Stacie Bloomfield hosts an alumni roundtable with graduates of her Leverage Your Art course. Emily Johnson, Ash Cascade Design, Laura Sevigny, and Debby Lightman share the lessons that actually moved the needle — not theories, not inspiration porn, but the specific things that changed how they show up for their businesses every day.

Stacie has helped more than 5,000 artists build real income from their work through programs like Leverage Your Art and Side Hustle Society. This episode gives you four different angles on what that transformation actually looks like.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Leverage Your Art — Stacie's signature course on building a real art licensing business from scratch. Every artist featured in this episode went through it — and every quote below came from that experience.
• The Artist's Side Hustle — Stacie's Hay House book. The perfect first step before the course — or the companion to it. It sold out its first print run in four months.
• Side Hustle Society — The community where artists stay accountable after doing the course work. Waitlist opens regularly — get on it.

HERE ARE THE 4 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

1️⃣ Sustainable Art Business Growth Is Always Step by Step

"All of this doesn't happen overnight. It's step after step. It's little goal after little goal." — Emily Johnson

Artists who expect their businesses to explode overnight almost always quit before the growth arrives. The truth that Emily and every artist in this roundtable knows: sustainable growth is always incremental. The accumulation of small, consistent actions — a pitch sent, a product photographed, an email written — is what builds a real business over time. There are no shortcuts that work long-term. But there is a path, and it's walked one step at a time.

The right information speeds this up. Knowing what to do next — because you've learned from someone who's already done it — removes the time cost of figuring it out yourself. That's the leverage.

2️⃣ The Right Creative Community Carries You Through the Hard Days

"You can lift each other up, and you can share — and in the hard days, the other person that you're friends with is probably going through a fantastic day, and they can lift you through those times." — Ash Cascade Design

Creative entrepreneurship is lonely when you try to do it in isolation. The artists who build lasting businesses almost always have a community — people who understand the specific challenges of making money from their art. Not general business coaches. Not well-meaning friends who "don't really get it." People who are doing the same thing, navigating the same platforms, facing the same rejection and the same wins.

Ash's insight is simple and profound: on your hard day, someone in your community is having a great day. And they'll pull you forward if you let them. That's what Side Hustle Society is built around.

3️⃣ Fear of Failure Costs More Than Failure Itself

"You can't not do something because you're scared. Growth and opportunity is on the other side of it." — Laura Sevigny

Every artist has faced the version of this: a pitch you haven't sent because you're afraid of rejection. A price you haven't raised because you're afraid of losing customers. A platform you haven't tried because you're afraid of looking stupid. Fear of failure is the most expensive thing in a creative business — because it costs you the growth that's waiting on the other side of the thing you're not doing.

Laura's point isn't "be fearless." It's be afraid and do it anyway. The fear doesn't have to disappear for you to move. It just has to stop being the deciding factor.

4️⃣ The Right Course Can Be the Turning Point — If You're Ready to Receive It

"I've taken every course out there… This is the only course that anybody really needs, honestly. If you want to have a successful business, this is the one." — Debby Lightman

Debby isn't the only Leverage Your Art graduate who says something like this, and Stacie Bloomfield doesn't share it to brag — she shares it because she's genuinely seen the course change lives, and she believes in making that opportunity available. Whether you went to art school and never learned the business side, or you're starting from scratch with no formal training, having a clear system — a curriculum built on what actually works — removes years of fumbling in the dark.

The myth of the starving artist exists because most artists never learned what's available to them. That's what Leverage Your Art is built to change.

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE ART + AUDIENCE PODCAST

Are you building your art business right now? Call the Art + Audience voicemail at (479) 966-9561 — Stacie would love to hear your story or answer your question in a future episode. Subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts to help other artists find the show.

Frequently Asked Questions About Building a Successful Art Business

How long does it take to build a successful art business?

There's no fixed timeline, but sustainable growth is always incremental — step after step, goal after goal. Most artists who build successful businesses do so over years, not months. The variable that matters most isn't speed — it's consistency and the quality of the information you're acting on. Learning from someone who has already done what you're trying to do significantly shortens the time it takes to figure out what actually works.

Do you need to go to art school to run a successful art business?

No. Art school teaches craft — it rarely teaches business. Many of the most successful artists Stacie Bloomfield has worked with through Leverage Your Art are self-taught or came from entirely different careers. What you need is a clear system: how to build a marketable portfolio, how to pitch, how to price, how to find buyers. That system is learnable without a degree.

What is the Leverage Your Art course and who is it for?

Leverage Your Art is Stacie Bloomfield's signature course on building a real art licensing and art business income from scratch. It's built for artists who already create and want to learn how to make consistent money from their work — not beginners learning to draw, but creators ready to learn the business. Graduates have gone on to license their art, open wholesale accounts, build email lists, and create sustainable businesses from their creative work.

About Stacie Bloomfield

Stacie Bloomfield is the founder of Gingiber, a surface pattern design and art licensing brand she built from her dining room table into a multimillion-dollar business with products in 1,400+ brick-and-mortar stores. She has earned $500K+ through art licensing and has taught 5,000+ artists how to build real income from their work.

She is the author of The Artist's Side Hustle (Hay House), a Moda fabric designer, and the host of the Art + Audience podcast. Her programs — including Side Hustle Society, Leverage Your Art, and the Art Licensing Pitch Playbook — help artists at every stage turn their creativity into consistent income.