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Transcript

Karla: This week, I spoke to Rosie Johnson. She's an awesome freelance illustrator from Devon who illustrates beautiful and often very funny illustrations. She's both very entertaining and inspiring. She does politics with a massive dash of humor thrown in, and she's super on it when it comes to social and political commentary, which is why I'm also a big fan of her work. 

You'll notice that I totally found girl Rosie when she came on the podcast. Poor woman. I've been a fan of Rosie's work for a few years now, and her website is basically my go to for birthday cards and presents. So as a fan, it was a joy to talk to her. She is at once very light hearted but also very deep, which comes across in her illustrations, but also on the podcast. I've never met Rosie, and I'm so happy she said yes to coming on. I never really know what people are gonna say when I ask, when I drop in their DMs on Instagram, or I email them, and I ask Rosie, not only because I'm a big fan, but because she's an illustrator, which I think is just so cool. I really wanted a maker of some sort for this last episode of this series. 

Rosie: I'm Rosie Johnson. I'm 42, I'm a Scorpio. No, that's not what you want to know, is it? I have been an illustrator full time since 2016 having been a primary school teacher for 15 years before that, and I've got two children, one who keeps telling me it's his seventh birthday in two weeks time, and an 11 year old as well. He's just started at secondary. And I live in Devon with my partner and my kids.

Karla: So you're a freelance illustrator with your own business. Can you tell us how you got into illustrating and how you started the business? 

Rosie: I mean, it's one of those funny things. I think I've always really loved drawing. It wasn't something that was completely alien to me, anyway, and even as a primary school teacher, basically my most fun bits were drawing stuff, making resources, doing the art with the kids. 

Then a friend asked me to do her wedding invitations, to draw her and her fiance for the wedding invitations. And then, as those things do, that led to another wedding invitation and another and another. And I had been dabbling in doing kind of portraits and bits and pieces for people for quite a while as a part time teacher. Then my final teaching placement was just a maternity cover, and I knew I didn't really want to apply for anything at that school beyond that. Then I thought, I'm going to give this a go. And I guess the beauty of having a teaching qualification is that you know, you can do supply and do other bits and pieces to make ends meet. So I wasn't too panicked about taking the leap. I thought, I'll take it a school term at a time and see what happens, and top it up with supply as needs be. I read a few books about starting businesses and didn't finish any of them. Spoke to a few friends, you know, got a vague idea of what I wanted to do, and then just went for it. 

That first September, that would have been the beginning of term, you know, for every year before that, apart from the years I was on maternity leave, you know that 1st September was like, right here I go. I remember packing my son off to childcare, and my daughter off to school, and my partner after his teaching job and being at home going, this is what I'm doing for my job. 

I spent weeks doing that, and I still do that to a certain extent, going - ‘this is what I get to do?’. I think not having too much of a long term plan has really helped me, because I've just thought, Okay, I'll just see how it goes for a bit longer and a bit longer. Now I realise I'm four years in. I haven't done supply for years. I don't need to do anything other than the job I'm doing. So, yeah, it's kind of crept up on me.

Karla: So you were a teacher before launching your own business. And I have another friend who was a primary school teacher, and she said the reason she left was because the hours just got too much and it was overtaking her life. Do you think that's why you left? 

Rosie: That's part of it. Definitely. I was a real career teacher. I absolutely was devoted to it. And then when I had our first child when I was 30, we had so many complications with that pregnancy and nearly lost the baby, and she was quite premature, and I made a lot of deals with myself about what my priorities would be, you know -  I promise that I will definitely look after you and you will be my number one, you know, just please be well enough. 

So in the wee small hours in the intensive care unit, I made the shift. I suppose, in my head, my priority must always be this small person. And it turns out the next one that comes along as well. And I think that's great and fine. And I'm sure lots of people managed to do part time teaching and parenting really successfully, but because it had been, you know, everything beforehand, and I used to spend all weekends making stuff and devoted to it and going into school at the weekends and all that, I never quite regained that absolute joy of it when I returned part time, mainly because that switch goes off in your brain I think, and you just think it isn't the be all and end all. 

I found it hard to treat it as just a job, but equally, I didn't want to be spending all my waking hours devoted to that when I wanted to be with the kids. So I had a good run up to it, a good five years of still teaching and feeling not quite as in it as I had done before. And then it changed quite a lot. Education has changed since I trained in the early 2000s and there's less autonomy, I think.

I spent the first few years of my career feeling like I was totally clueless, and trying to learn from everybody, and being really nervous about it. Then I spent a bit of time in New Zealand shadowing some of their early years expertise out there, which is amazing. New Zealand's got it sorted on so many levels, and I came back gung ho, and spent the next few years of my teaching career really feeling like I wasn't nailing it. I never feel like that, but I knew what I was doing, and I was so excited about doing it. A combination of having had children, different priorities, and also feeling like I'm not sure if that's the way nationally that education is going at the moment, and hopefully it will swing back that way again, where play and dispositions of learning and stuff become more at the forefront. But it was certainly in the last few years of my teaching. You know, there's a lot of emphasis on, can they do this? And can we tick these boxes? Are we getting them to know all of their letter sounds and all of that's important, but I just think you've got to get kids ready and willing to learn before you pile on the content. I fell out of love with it, I guess.

Karla: What does life look like as a freelance illustrator?

Rosie: Well, I work from home. I was working in the little shed at the bottom of our garden, but that's a bit too small. So I have now taken over our spare room office which is also, to be honest, too small, partly to do with me being incredibly untidy, and partly just because the business is starting to grow so I'm packed into this little downstairs office once the kids are at school. 

I have a school day to work in, essentially, which isn't very long, as I'm sure lots of people know, and I have three or four projects on the go. I tend to flit a little bit between things, or I get a real passion for doing something. Focus on that for a few days, and then I have a couple of other things going on. So I have various design jobs. I try and keep up with the old social media, Instagram, in particular, in that lovely community there. So I'll be doing a bit of the proper work in the morning, and then making sure I've got something lined up to post about or bang on about on there. And then I try to get all of my orders done in a kind of set period before I then go and pick up my son and send post on the way. So it follows a pretty simple pattern like that. 

I find I'm quite focused, which I was when I first went into it, a little bit worried that I wouldn't have been. I've never worked for myself before. I was worried that I'd be sitting in my pants watching Loose Women. I mean, I've never watched Loose Women. I don't why I would suddenly start watching Loose Women? But I'm weirdly disciplined. Actually, I don't even think about it. I do listen to podcasts and audio books and music sometimes, but I just work. I think it comes from absolutely loving what you're doing. It doesn't feel like a chore. 

Karla: All the women who are in their own businesses on the podcast have all said that. So what are the joys and challenges of working for yourself?

Rosie: The joys are that you're your own boss - you get to set the agenda - I can follow the things that interest me, and I have a passion for. I love that. I suppose that's the challenge as well, because you're your own boss, you don't get any time off from your own head. I think, if I was working for anybody else, they'd let me have way more tea breaks than I allow. And there's probably some European Working Time Directive that I'm breaking almost every day. 

But seriously, I think the challenges are obvious in the sense of not knowing what your monthly income is going to be. So there's that continual feeling of - what's the next thing? I don't feel - even now after four years -  comfortable enough with the pattern of the year to know that it's okay if I have a low January and it will pick up, I still do that sort of panicky ‘Oh my goodness no one's ever going to buy from me again. I'm rubbish. I can't draw anything’. 

I have to have a word with myself quite a lot. It's getting easier each year, because I can see it does follow a pattern, and I know now that you plan Christmas in July and then it runs itself much better, and you maximize all those sort of seasonal things, and you allow yourself to be a bit more chilled out in the summer, because you know, your big times for selling are set, really by the calendar. So I'm getting to the point where I'm allowing myself to be a bit freer with it and just have more down times and see that as a blessing and not a curse.

Karla: I bought one of your Mother's Day cards yesterday. The one about ‘now I'm a parent, I can totally understand’. 

Rosie: That's been my absolute best seller ever! I think maybe because it's from the heart as well, and it's exactly what I say to my mum; ‘oh, I get it now. Thank you. How are you so good at this? I'm so sorry for everything I did before. Please tell me everything’. Being a parent is definitely the hardest of all the jobs I've ever had.

Karla: Oh, totally, absolutely. And what advice do you have for women listening, who might be thinking of starting their own business?

Rosie: There's loads of absolutely brilliant books and podcasts and audiobooks with tons of ACE advice. The creative industry that I'm in, there's a community called the Indie Roller. I don't know if you've heard of them, and Leona who set that up is an independent, creative business owner herself, and it's set up as a subscription model, and it's got amazing support. So it's community support, and she sets up all these brilliant workshops about marketing and business strategy and all of that. And that has been incredibly useful and a really good thing to do. 

I guess whatever industry you're going into, however you're setting up your business, I would look for that - community is key. Always find the other people in your area that are doing something similar, and learn from them, because there's no such thing as you know. You know you're not doing an original thing; setting up your own business. It'll be unique to you, but there will be plenty of commonalities, so you can learn from the people around you. But then the flip side of that is, at some point just go for it. Because, like I said, before, I started to read a load of books before I went for it, and then I just thought; ‘oh, do you know what I’m just going to do it, because nothing like mistakes to help you learn really and and crack on and then know that you're going to be years and years and years into it, making mistakes, learning from them, not doing it like that again, making a new mistake, learning from that, not doing it like that again, and so on and so on. And that's totally cool. And how everyone does it, I think.

Karla: Moving on to talk about this last year, which has been like no other, we've had the pandemic, and now the UK has their third lockdown. Have you evolved the business at all? Have you had to do things differently? 

Rosie: Definitely. Throughout the year, lots of the places where I would stock my work have closed because there have been non-essential businesses. So any of that revenue that was just ticking along from my wholesale to shops, just instantly, overnight, closed down. So I had to move a lot of my stuff online, it always has been but it's solely online. So it's all down to me now, and that's a relatively simple process. Because I had a website, had an Etsy shop, my website's got a shop as well, and it's just a question of ramping up the PR for it. 

I joined Thoughtful, the independent card marketplace, which I'm sure lots of people know about, which actually I had heard of, and I'd seen a lot of advertising for. I didn't really put two and two together that I could actually be on there, but it's been a real life saver this year, because, as a designer, you know, you upload your design, and then they do all of the stuff, they print it, they post it, pack it, which has a kind of one woman band. I can't do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of orders a day, but they can, so there's no limit to the number of people that can buy my card from them. And I get the industry standard amount as my design fee, and it's lovely, because it's a bit of passive income, just ticking over in the background, and I can carry on doing work at the level that I was working at. 

I suppose that's going back to your question before, about the challenges of up scaling a business of when you're one person is tricky, because there's only so many hours in the day, and I'm getting better at being super fast and efficient with my ordering process, and I've got a little label printer and I'm all hooked up to the systems, but I still can only literally pack what I can pack without asking for extra help, which during a pandemic is not ideal. 

I think a lot, a lot of my business, the sort of front face of my business, is my social media output. Whereas before the pandemic kicked in, I was in the middle of the March ‘Meet the Maker’ Instagram challenge, which is a lovely yearly creative business challenge, loads of behind the scenes, photos, processes and that kind of thing. And got midway through that and was posting ‘hhere's my Eco packaging’ and then the news was bombarding us that we need to do something about it, and I, for the first time, just abandoned that challenge and thought I want to draw and write about what's going on. I think that might be what's more important to me, whether or not it makes me any money. 

So I switched it a bit, and certainly during the first lockdown, just really focused on communicating with people and trying to put out relatable content for other people who are maybe struggling and finding it all a bit much. And when George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter movement really came to the forefront of everyone's minds and the news, I found myself way more interested in exploring that and talking about anti-racism and white privilege even though that didn't really relate to the things you could buy from my shop, necessarily, just felt more important. 

I suppose having the pandemic was a bit of a shake to think; ‘oh, actually, this is kind of what I want my business to be about’, even if it's not directly a source of income, it is very much who I am and what I'm interested in. Then it turns out that you just gather more people like that around you, and they happen to want to buy your stuff anyway. It felt like a very different process for the business, but really organic, and, right, I suppose.

Karla: That's amazing. My next question was where do you find inspiration for illustrations? Because it’s fairly political, quite a lot of the time. So that was a conscious decision?

Rosie: Yeah, I mean, I've always been interested in politics. I think sometimes when you say to people I’m interested in politics, feminism, they're like’ ‘oh, God’ and it is deliberately, I think, painted as this boring, dull, dry subject that most people aren’t quite bothered with. 

One of the drivers for me is to not make light of things, but to find a take on it that can be accessible to more people, because I genuinely believe that small p politics is absolutely ingrained in every decision that we make. You know, you just have to walk out of your house and your pavement is politics. Everything is politics, just as everything is feminism and intersectionality and racism is in every tiny grain of our society. So you can ignore it if you want, but it's still there. 

I thought I might as well use what little ability I have in terms of communicating and drawing to to spread that net further, because we're all, I think, maybe getting a bit more aware of how much we're in a bubble of people that just agree with us and that the algorithms on social media feed that bubble. So you're literally just preaching to the converted all the time. I think the beauty of - I don't want to sound pretentious, because I don't really think of myself as an artist - but the beauty of art or illustration is that you can capture something in such an accessible way and because social media is so like, flip through, click, click, like, like, like, if you tried to do that in words alone, you'd lose everybody. But if you can do it in an image or with a few words, they might stop and read just even if it's only to give you five minutes of their time, and then go’ oh, I haven't thought about it like that’. That's, you know, pretty cool.

Karla: I actually wanted to talk about politics, a bit about the Boris Johnson card debacle late last year, for people who don't know, could you explain what happened and why it's so important to credit artists?

Rosie: So basically, in August we had this whole ‘eat out to help out’ thing in the UK, where we were all encouraged to go and eat for half price meals. And then when the kids all went back to school in September, and the Coronavirus level started to rise, and it was all like; ‘oh, I shouldn't have done that’. And it all became a bit hokey cokey. So I drew this silly little illustration of Boris Johnson with ‘put your whole self in, put your whole self out, eat out, help out, shake it all about’. I was really pleased with it, but it was just going to be a Thoughtful card design. So I loaded onto Thoughtful and didn't think anything else about it, and I didn't post about it myself, because I just wanted to see if it was going to make it into their directory. Then somebody had bought it from Thoughtful, and taken - what was an absolutely rubbish - photo.

That's the part of the thing that annoyed me the most about it. It's like a really grey, badly lit photo of the front of this card, and they shared it on their social media, and it's been shared. I mean, the last time I bothered to care about seeing how many times it had been shared, it was over 500,000 times! Nothing's ever been shared that much. So this crappy picture had been shared half a million times, but obviously with no credit to me on it at all, because it was the front of a card. And what I'm really careful to do in all of my social media posts is to put my logo on the bottom, like unobtrusively, but there, so that people know who's done it. And if you'd looked on the back of the card, of course, you could see who'd done it, but who takes a photo of the front and the back of the card just to share a funny image.

I didn't feel any animosity towards the person who'd shared it, because I thought; ‘yeah, God, I'd probably do that. I'd probably take a photo of something I thought was funny and just share it’. You don't know it's going to go viral, but it did really make me think, you know, even when you share a meme, someone has made that it might have only taken them two minutes, but everything has been created by somebody, and it does definitely make me stop and think, if I'm seeing something that I like, to try and find where it's come from and to credit the artist or the creator where possible, because I could have had, let's be cynical about it. I could have 250,000 people buy that card, or, like, on even 10,000 people buy that card. That would have made all the difference. It's been a popular card, still on Thoughtful and I'm not complaining particularly. It's just you know, sometimes I'll create something literally just for social media. It's got nothing to do with anything you can buy and it gets shared, and I don't get credited. But that happened to be something that could have actually made me some money. But never mind.

Karla: I actually bought it as a memento. Can you tell I'm a fan? I actually bought it as a memento of this crazy lockdown period.

Rosie: Someone had said that to me I should have made it into a print, because they were saying they don't really want it as a card with happy birthday on it. So I have slightly altered it, and I have a print on the website now, because I think a few people have said, I just want this framed in my toilet.

Karla: Have you always been a feminist?

Rosie: I guess so. I mean, my parents are pretty political. Once it was explained to me, it was a bit of a ‘well, duh, obviously’ moment. Like, who wouldn't be? Kind of thing. I know as a teenager, it was like’ ‘oh no, don't need to believe in feminism, because everybody's equal’. It was the equivalent of, you know, all lives matter, kind of stuff. 

But I was really keen for my kids not to have that impression of it, because it should be a base level. As far as I'm concerned, everyone should be a feminist. If you're if you're not a feminist, what's going on? There's something wrong, isn't there? This? What are you saying you don't? What is it you don't like about equality? Would be my rejoinder to that. So since being at university, I've been actively, happily, calling myself a feminist, and I'm - as a parent - quite keen that my six year old boy and 11 year old girl are going, yep, of course, I am. Why wouldn't I be? 

Ever since Sid was little, we've talked about consent, not in explicit terms, but in terms of like, if you're being tickled, if you're having a tickle fight, you need to say stop. You have to stop straight away. That's how that works. Like, even if you think it's fine and you're having a fun time and it's all right, if someone asks you to stop, you stop. And we call it - we give it the words - that's called consent. If someone consents to do it, then it's fine. And if they don't, then you stop, whether or not you think what you're doing is okay. So we try and I just think again, like with the racism issue, if you're black or a person of colour, you don't have any choice about whether you learn about racism. There's never a too young age, I think, to discuss these things with them, it has to be done.

Karla: There's a running theme of fairness and doing things ethically in your business. I noticed that the clothing you sell is ethically made, and everything's printed on recycled paper and packaged not in cellophane. Why is that important to you when running a business?

Rosie: I think when I realised that I would be a business, not just drawing but creating actual products, it was really, really important to me that I didn't bring stuff into the world unnecessarily, I suppose, and add to our already huge problem with lack of resources. 

I do genuinely think there is a market - there's a need -  in the world, for things that are just beautiful and make us feel happy. So I didn't feel any qualms about creating stuff, necessarily, and also the same with clothing. 

You know, the fast fashion industry is appalling, but T mill, who I used to create my T shirts, are recycling all of the materials you can send once you're done with your T shirt, once it's worn out, you can send it back to them, and it gets recycled back into the process again, and they use any organic cotton. I think the more we show that that's what we want as consumers, the better. So I thought, well, if I want that as a consumer, I wouldn't consider buying fast fashion. When I buy something from a small business, I don't want it wrapped in a load of plastic, because actually, it just goes in the bin, doesn't it? And even if it goes into the recycling, it's just more and more waste. So I try to create in the mindset of the kind of customer I am, and I use recycled packaging, and I also reuse packaging. 

So if somebody sent me something and it's in a perfectly serviceable box, I will send that out to a customer and write on the box this has been, you know, around the block. I think if we normalise that, then people will get used to it and think, yeah, why does it matter to me, if this cardboard box has been to three different places already, we should be thrilled about it. It makes me feel better about the fact that I'm making things if I know that they've had the least impact on the environment and have been as kind as possible to anybody that might have had to have done the physical production of it before it got to me.

Karla: Looking at the clothing, actually, I noticed the ‘more than one way to be a woman’ T shirt. Where did that idea come from? 

Rosie: Partly as a parent, you know, being really careful about talking about gender stereotyping and not wanting them to grow up with this narrow binary idea of feminine and masculine, and also kind of part of the community that I've become involved in when mainly online with all the genders who are just feeling like maybe a bit marginalised and I feel like, we're all on a big spectrum here. 

You don't have to be skinny and beautiful and conventionally beautiful and all that kind of stuff to be an acceptable woman. And you don't have to have been born female to be a woman, as far as I'm concerned. So I like the idea that you would put your heart on your sleeve and your words on your chest, literally, and say, I believe there's more than one way to be a woman. And I believe that for little girls growing up, little boys growing up, you know, children that are going, Ah, hang on a minute. I've been assigned female at birth, but actually, I don't feel like that, and that's okay. I hope that by the time our kids are my age, that this is a chat that we're having about things that people used to believe in the distant past, rather than a struggle that they're still having to go through. 

Karla: You talk a lot about community on your social media, actually in your blogs. Why do you think community is important to women? And are you part of any women centric communities online?

Rosie: Not specifically just women. A community is just the best in all its forms. I think that's one of the things that's been a silver lining of the pandemic, in a way, community in our local area has been amazing. Just little Facebook groups and people looking out for each other and putting up notices in their window and all the rainbows and all that stuff of actually, we are here for each other, and I find it far more invigorating to have chats with people I don't know.

I'm not a natural business person. I don't think in the sense that I thought it meant so I'm not that bothered about selling, selling, selling all the time. I would much rather get to know people and connect with them and have stuff in common, and maybe lose a few potential customers on the way, if it meant that my people were the people that were commissioning me or buying from me, or wanting me to design something for them, because then I'm doing it for people with shared values, and that means more to me than just raking in the bucks, I guess. But in terms of online spaces, I don't think I'm a part of any particular exclusively women communities. 

Karla: Is there a woman or women in your life who inspired you or supported you along the way? 

Rosie: Now I'm going to be a massive cliche, as I expect this is what everybody says, but it's going to have to be my mum, and not just because you're supposed to say that, and I'll make her listen to this. But listen to this, she's just the best. She's one of the best people anyone could ever meet, and lots of people, she lives locally now as well, with my dad, which is lovely. Lots of my friends are friends with her, and they all say; ‘oh, you're so lucky. You're so lucky’. I have to fob that off and go; ‘oh no, she's a nightmare’. No, I know. I'm really lucky. She is amazing. 

She was a head teacher at a primary school and brilliant at it, and used to write all the plays that would be performed at the school. And she's a brilliant artist, and so creative, and she's got boundless energy and ideas, and she's funny. She's so funny, and her and dad have been a continual support. I was worried when I said, Look, I'm going to stop teaching. I'm not happy because they're both teachers, you know, a family of teachers, and I thought it would be a disappointment, and they were just thrilled for me. They are so supportive, and it must have been nerve wracking thinking there's no pension. What the hell's she doing? But they genuinely wanted me to feel happy and fulfilled, and knew that I'd been really desperately, quite unhappy in my last teaching job, and they were just like, go for it. Just do it. You can do this. We believe in you. 

I was pretty crap at the beginning. I've learned a lot in the last few years. I'm way better at it now than I was then. But they just knew that. They've had faith in my ability to turn things around and to go for it. I've just had that as a grounding throughout really. Knowing I had this very clever, funny, inspirational woman right around the corner who would constantly be delighted to hear my boring news and cheer me along and buy my stuff when no one else did.

Karla: She sounds amazing. What's her name? 

Rosie: Vicky Johnson. She is a boss in all possible senses. 

Karla: So what's on the horizon for you now? At Rosie Johnson Illustrates?

Rosie: To a certain extent, who knows. The Devon and Cornwall Ambulance Service have asked me to design the vehicle for when they go to festivals, their cool pride ambulance, with wheel diversity and groovy images on is something that I'm in the middle of. That's a really nice job. I'm starting some illustrations for a book. I've got lots of little bits and pieces on the go, some product ideas on the go. I hope that the horizon holds lots of things I just get to say yes to and then work out how to do them after.

Karla: And if someone wants to go and have a look at your work, where can they find you?

Rosie: I'm on Instagram at Rosie Johnson illustrates, and my website is https://rosiejohnsonillustrates.com/ 

Karla: Brilliant. Oh, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Such a pleasure.

Rosie: Thank you for having me. Lovely to be invited.