Today we’d like to introduce you to Corrie Liotta.
Corrie, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Believe it or not, the path to a career as an illustrator is not a clear-cut one, especially when you hail from the Carolinas and don’t have access to the major entertainment cities like New York or LA. After graduating from a small university in Rock Hill, SC with a bachelor of fine arts in 2012, I had no shortage of odd jobs, including but not limited to working at a Dillard’s, doing grunt work as a graphic design intern, making a life-size “pop-up book” for a stage prop, doing a smattering of stage production work for a variety of minor- and mega-churches (a whole can of worms I won’t open here!), working at a real estate office as agent support (essentially a secretary), and working as a barista for five years. While working a more-or-less dead end desk job at the real estate office, I began offering the realtors I worked with illustrations of the homes they sold—watercolor paintings or drawings—and slowly began to carve out a little niche for myself to find paid work as an illustrator. Fast forward ten years, one crowdfunded children’s book, and a stroke of luck finding remote freelance illustration work through a friend at the end of 2020, I’m now illustrating or doing design freelance work nearly full-time, with plenty of room to grow!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road to a freelance illustration career has by no means been a smooth one—it’s a path with high highs and low lows. The high highs: writing, illustrating, and crowdfunding my own children’s book called The Appropriate Pirate; doing occasional storyboarding work, illustrating for clients like The Women’s March, Sally Beauty, and MTV, and making a mural for Wal-Mart. The low lows: experiencing what it’s like to have $1.78 in my bank account with rent due in a few days’ time (don’t worry, it worked out), having work I felt proud of be rejected, going weeks or months without knowing where I’d find my next job, crying in frustration because Adobe After Effects has a huge learning curve…the list goes on! I’ve found, however, that struggling because of problems I face as a freelancer feels much better than crying in frustration because I just spilled a customer’s coffee all over the floor during a morning rush, or feeling like I was spinning my wheels because I was 30 and on my fifth year working in coffee with no real vision for the future of my career. It’s hard work, but it’s very rewarding!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I illustrate and sell stickers, greeting cards, prints, screen printed goods, and I am currently writing and illustrating a second children’s book. As a freelancer, I’ve done client work animating gifs for social justice campaigns, storyboarding for pitches and commercials, and more! I’m always trying to learn something new. I work in a mix of traditional and digital mediums—I love the freedom and ease of editing that a platform like Procreate allows to play around with different ideas, and I also love the mess of working with my hands to paint something and find a happy accident. Lately, I’ve been teaching myself the art of screen printing—coating screens with emulsion fluid, drying them overnight, burning an image on to them with a transparency and a UVLED light, and passing the paint through each screen to create different layers of color in pursuit of a final image—it’s such a process, and it’s so rewarding to see the result every time! With the specter of AI hanging over so many careers, bringing a hand-made human touch to any of my work feels essential. My children’s book was painted entirely in watercolor, and it’s probably the work I’m most proud of. I put my heart and soul into that book during a difficult time in my life, and while there are certainly things I would change when I look back at it, I’m still so proud of the story, the design, and of myself for seeing it through from initial sketches in 2017 to watching parents read it to their kids eight years later. As far as what sets me apart is concerned, it’s me—everything I create is infused with my personality, my sense of humor, my experiences, and my view of the world. Artists may sometimes overlap in style or in method, but ultimately we all bring our own unique viewpoint to the work, and that’s what sets any of us apart from the other; most importantly, it’s what sets all of us apart from any image, paragraph, or idea cobbled together by a machine.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
I think success is defined by how many times you’re willing to fail; or, how many times you DID fail, and kept going anyway. A successful attempt at any creative endeavor is not only preceded by a string of failed attempts, but often shaped by those failures. In art, as well as in life, I don’t think success exists without failure; it’s defined by it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.corrieliottaillustration.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/corrieliotta/
- Other: https://corrieliottaillustration.myportfolio.com/
