E83: From Paint to Pixels: How Traditional Art and Digital Tools Work Together in Licensing

In this solo episode, Delores explores the false divide between paint and pixels. 

She invites us into her studio, sharing memories of constructing mixed-media pieces by hand and her early experiments with collage, art journals and sculpture. 

As a teacher, she adopted digital tools like Illustrator and Photoshop to expand her creative possibilities without abandoning her roots. 

Delores recalls her first licensing contract with Russ (the teddy bear people), how working with a wall-art agent pushed her to build collections, and why her traditional background still informs every digital brush stroke. 

Throughout, she reassures artists that licensing doesn’t require slick perfection—buyers are drawn to work that feels warm, human and handmade.

Ready to blend your own paint and pixels? 

Give this episode a listen and, if you enjoy it, please share with a creative friend or support the show! 🎧

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey my friends. Welcome back to the Creative Juggle Joy podcast. Today I wanna talk about something I hear from artists all the time, and that's the feeling they have to choose. They have to choose between traditional work or digital work. They have to choose between paint or pixels. They have to choose between what feels natural and what feels practical.

I wanna gently push back on that idea because my own career has been built by letting traditional and digital support each other and not compete with each other. If you've ever worried that going digital might dilute your work or that staying traditional might limit your opportunities, this episode is for you.

Let's talk about where all of this started. For me, my creative roots are in digital media, [00:01:00] drawing, painting, working by hand, learning how materials behave, and how small imperfections bring life to a piece. I did a lot of mixed media work. When I look around my studio here at the things that I still have hanging up that were things I've produced in the past, some of them probably well over 20, maybe 30 even years ago, most of them are some form of mixed media work.

I'm looking at one piece right now where the entire piece I created myself, I cut the frame. On a table saw that I have in my wood shop, I added the backing, which is wood. I nailed some tin that I had made markings on onto that backing piece. I collaged on that piece. I painted it. Looks like several different layers, [00:02:00] and I did maybe some pencil crayon work on it to kind of divide it a little bit.

I've got a raised piece in the middle. That piece is also collaged, and the front of that piece has a test tube in it or on it glued on, and then added to the mixed media, work with. More collage, kind of holding it onto the panel and then that test tube has a cork on it. I could take off the cork and within it there's a note of some sort.

And right now I'm actually not remembering what's on that note, so I'm gonna have to check that out one of these days. But that's the kind of work I used to do it used to take me weeks to do pieces at times, and I would do several at a time. So that's how I started out and when I was teaching fine arts, I did a lot of collage work with my students and mixed media, [00:03:00] and we did a lot of work in art journals.

And I probably have, you know, 30 years of art journals plus flat files of everything you can imagine from watercolor to, natural media, things like pastel. All the different materials that used to come into the schools with salesmen who were trying to sell us, whatever that particular technique or art tool or substrates of all kinds, we would have that brought into the school and we would get a chance to play with them.

We often got free samples. Our town here didn't have an art supply store, so we were far away and the only way they could sell to our school would be to come and show us what was new. So I got to play with a lot of different things. Now, when I started teaching, digital [00:04:00] tools also entered my workflow

I really didn't even think about it at the time that digital tools could replace my natural media work. But the more I started to work with the digital tools, the more I started to imagine or think about ways, because I wanted to expand what was possible. And remember back in the day, in the late eighties, there was no such thing as the internet and no Pinterest or any place like that to see what people were doing.

It was just all an experiment, and so I started to learn my software really thoroughly. We had Illustrator and Photoshop. That's basically what we started to use, and I just wanted to make that distinction that digital tools didn't take anything away from my work, but it did start to give me more [00:05:00] flexibility, more reach, and more longevity.

Even when I'm working now in digital media, my traditional background is always there. It shows up in my line quality. It shows up in restraint. It shows how I use color. It shows in how much space I leave and where I let things feel a little bit imperfect. If you've been in any of my classes, you know that I still do a ton of what I consider mixed media work.

And how many times have I showed you pieces that I build upon backgrounds that I have created with traditional media. So that is a real thing for me. My first art licensing contract was with Russ, the Teddy Bear, people in the US and they had a subsidiary company [00:06:00] here in Canada. I was hired by them, and so the first five years of my art licensing were, we're the gift market for the most part, gift and garden centers, 

Once that contract ended, I started to look for an agent to work with. That company closed, and really, I had only just started learning about art licensing, so I started to look for an agent because of course, I was still working full-time as a high school teacher, so I didn't have a lot of time.

To do the selling. I really didn't even know how to do it. I had no idea. Let's be honest here, not a hot clue. So I started to look for an agent, and the agent that I found was selling extra large wall art pieces that could be used in [00:07:00] hotels or. Homes, but not small things like what I was doing for the gift market.

So I developed a line of this large, abstract art that combined my traditional media with digital media. Simple as that. I would. Scan the traditional media, I would import it with a really good high quality scan, and then I would work with that artwork either as a background or I would composite a couple of them together.

But honestly, all of the traditional work I did had already trained my eye. It had taught me patience and gave me that whole idea of problem solving [00:08:00] to create beautiful work. All of that carries directly into digital work. Honestly, the traditional and the digital just started to kind of meld together.

I created digital work that comes from a. Traditional foundation because I think it feels human. I think buyers can sense it even if they don't know why. So as I'm teaching digitally now, I am teaching exactly how to get that traditional feeling with the art that I create.

Digital tools are what allow traditional inspired art to live in the art licensing world,

I can now scale my artwork cleanly. I can create variations. I can create collections. In fact, that was one of the first things that I learned from this agent. I would be [00:09:00] giving him all kinds of individual pieces and he said to me, you have got to start working in collections. I didn't even know what he was talking about, but once it was explained to me, and at that point I could start doing some research, I was able to.

Go to the sites that would be potentially selling my work. And sometimes once in a while I got to work with an art director directly. So my agent would sell my work to somebody or license my work to somebody, and that somebody would be an art director. And that art director would.

Tell me how they could use, you know, six pieces or eight pieces that worked together because their client, the one they were selling to was a hotel, a hotel chain, or it [00:10:00] was for corporate offices. And the great thing about working digitally was that I could do things like adjust the color for different products and for different clients.

And I didn't have to repaint everything from scratch. I could. Do a lot of it digitally and then just make it look traditional by providing or adding to it my own natural media backgrounds. That flexibility is what made it possible to license work for home decor, for wall art, for textiles, and believe it or not, even places like.

Art on Tile, which is a company that reproduces my artwork on ceramic tiles that people have installed, let's say, above their stove. It's super cool. Check them out if you ever are curious. But the cool thing about it, I [00:11:00] was also protecting the integrity of my original artwork. That was. Such a great experience.

I'm still doing this. This has led to licensing opportunities with companies like Wayfair and if you want to look them up, places like Bentley, I've sold through Deny Designs and Art Wall is another cool one to check out. I should have pulled out the list before I started, but I am always surprised at who licenses my work.

One of them I remember too, is a mural company in Italy, so it can be so random. I'm always kind of keeping my eye out. Like we do a lot of traveling, so I'll be in hotels and I'll see this artwork throughout a hotel and I'm like, Ooh, I wonder if I could find my own work. I have seen the art of some of my favorite artists that way, but you never know where it's sold.

I mean, it could be. It could be anywhere. The companies that [00:12:00] we license to are also selling that artwork beyond their own company. So if you were to look at a place like Bentley, you'll see that they're offering my art or 30 different artists work to their clients. It's really cool, and I've loved doing that work.

I haven't done a lot of it recently, but I do love that work and the fact that it's out there and the fact that it's still earning me an income, even if it's been three years since I've actually submitted more art to that agent. And what I also love about it is that none of it required abandoning traditional media completely.

Required learning how to translate it into digital art. One of the biggest misconceptions about licensing is that buyers want everything to look perfectly polished or overly digital. And [00:13:00] actually it's kind of the opposite. They love the fact that they can get a collection of, let's say, 10 pieces that look like they've been done with traditional media.

But have actually been done digitally, which therefore gives the artist that method of creating related pieces. It's definitely a misconception that every watercolor piece that you look at that has been made into, greeting card line or has been made into, gift bags. They aren't all traditional watercolor, believe me.

In reality, many buyers are looking for the work that feels warm and approachable and human, and they don't look that closely. They just want that overall feeling. So if you become good at doing digital watercolor, [00:14:00] it sells work that translates well to products. The kind of works that you can sell and license and the kind of things that people live with every day.

I know for me, traditional influence helps me with that, even if it's looking at examples on sites like Pinterest. I'm looking at the texture and the variation. The subtlety, the colors that somebody's using, the texture of the brush they're using. All of those are the things that I'm looking for when I am looking at the examples, but I'm trying to think of how can I pull that off and what should I do as my subject matter?

What can I do to make it [00:15:00] different? Capture that same feeling. So those qualities definitely stand out in a sea of overly slick artwork. Do you remember the phase of everything being gradients and hard edges? There was definitely a. Period of time when that was super popular. But now we're seeing that all being replaced with what looks like much more natural media.

So what we're trying to do is capture that feeling of traditional media. So if you have a background in traditional media, you're already ahead because you know how to. Get that look, even if it's just in the traditional media. Once you start translating that into the digital and you start working with really great brushes and things, even creating your own brushes, you can create that same [00:16:00] consistency and cohesion and professionalism.

And believe me, it's not about perfection. It's about getting that look. So I'm gonna give some advice for those of you who want to explore this particular path. If you're curious about licensing, but you feel stuck between traditional and digital, here's what I want you to know. You don't have to abandon your favorite medium.

You don't have to reinvent yourself. You don't have to do everything at once. Start where you already are. If you love painting. Paint. Then explore how to scan it, how to photograph it, how to digitize your work thoughtfully, learn how to maybe clean it up without overworking it. Learn how to build collections slowly.

So for me, when I first started to do that technique where I was combining. Different pieces of [00:17:00] mine. I experimented a lot with things like blending modes, like just putting the full layer of one painting over the full layer of another painting and then experimenting with different sections of it or different colors.

The blend modes were definitely a thing. And then I started practicing adding a digital layer of paint strokes just to make the piece kind of work. So sometimes I would do that blend mode, and then I would go in and I would, because the two had blended in a way that was completely different than what the two individual pieces looked like, I would then add a bunch of detail with either, a paintbrush or let's say an ink brush. I would ink in areas or I would add just little marks. That kind of stuff is what sort of [00:18:00] broke me in, so to speak, to the whole idea of illustrating digitally. So it didn't come naturally for me to just sit down and draw and paint something digitally. It was when I put my traditional media together.

And then I did almost like what I would do in my art journals where I would start with collage and then I would add a bunch of acrylic paint that I would maybe scrape off with a credit card or, some hard piece of plastic, or I would make marks on it, or I would do some,

or I would do some sponge painting. Or I would use a marker or paintbrush or some of those cool free products that I got through the schools. That kind of attitude is what I brought into my digital work. And so then when I had the two different things together, of course they started to become [00:19:00] mixed media, right?

And then that. Third part of the mixed media. The first one was let's say a layer of the background. A second one would've been maybe a few things I had painted or drawn really loosely. I would meld those two together with blending modes. And then the last piece of it was that layer of what would be called traditional media in the brush type that I was using.

But I would be. Doing it completely digitally. So that's how I made it work. In case you are at that stage, that is a hundred percent viable way of doing it. And what it does is it gives you time to learn the digital tools and it helps you to just get comfortable and you'll start to be more and more experimentive, and that is a really good thing.

[00:20:00] The reason I talk so much about blending traditional and digital tools, it is because for me, it supports my sustainability. It gives me options, it gives my work more places to live. And I still go back to those journals maybe from 20 years ago at times, and I'll. Either scan or photograph a page, and that'll be the basis for a bunch of digital work that I'm doing.

And you know that in my classes I have done this and I have shown this, and even I've given away some of my own backgrounds for people to experiment with. I know in the card challenge, I've done that and in various classes in the membership. So this allows you to. Not look at a blank page, and it allows you to grow without burning out.

So try this technique, try it yourself, photograph a bunch of your work, and [00:21:00] then just try putting it together maybe with blend modes, and then just start inking or drawing on top of that, just like reading cards. Licensing doesn't have to be all or nothing. It can be one piece of a larger creative ecosystem that supports your life, your family, and your energy.

If there's one takeaway from today's episode, it's this. You don't have to choose between paint and pixels. You are allowed to use both. Yes, your traditional skills matter. They matter a lot. If you have none, that doesn't matter. It's really crazy, but. All of the things that you put into your artwork, they do matter because it's you and you're the one putting it together

knowing all of the skills, the traditional, the digital compositing, mixed media, all of the [00:22:00] stuff I've talked about today, all together, those can open doors that you may not even see yet. And I know this for a fact because it's happened to me. Spending this time with you talking about it actually has been super rewarding because I don't think I ever get a chance to just really talk about this and share what that journey has been like for me,

it has been a really long game. But you can definitely condense it into less time. The reason I've had the opportunities to do all of this, this kind of experimentation is because I have also taught a lot of different things. So take advice from me and learn from what I've just shared with you today, and thanks so much for letting me share that.[00:23:00] 

Keep creating. Keep juggling and most importantly, keep finding joy in the process.