Kourtni Gunn: Balancing Art, Design, and Motherhood
In her own words, artist and surface pattern designer Kourtni Gunn shares her journey from a childhood filled with creativity to becoming a full-time artist and entrepreneur. Based in Aldergrove, British Columbia, Kourtni reflects on how she turned her passion for watercolor painting into a thriving business. She also offers insights into balancing creativity with family life, her process of digital drawing, and practical tips for selling on platforms like Etsy and Faire.
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My name is Kourtni Gunn and I’m an artist, surface pattern designer, and mom of 3 from Aldergrove British Columbia. I have spent my whole life being creative, with a mom who’s a talented painter, and a dad who is into woodworking. My childhood was full of arts and crafts, and I’ve always enjoyed making things with my hands, but never really considered myself an artist. As I got older I started doing more crafting with things like crochet, pressed flower art, building the odd art piece out of wood, but still never considered myself an artist.
In 2020 I decided to try watercolour and that’s when everything changed for me. I became obsessed with painting, and at the end of 2020 after losing a dear friend, painting became somewhat of a therapy for me. I started posting my paintings online and even selling a few of them through Instagram and Etsy. One day I was listening to a podcast that Jenna Rainey was on, talking about surface pattern design and putting your patterns and artwork onto products, and that's when it clicked for me that I could turn this into a career. I ended up taking her online course called Brand Plus Brand, which taught me how to use Illustrator and Photoshop to turn my hand painted elements into repeating patterns. Every single thing in your home that has a design on it, from pillows to clothing to lunch boxes, was created by a surface pattern designer! I absolutely fell in love with that process and started making new watercolour patterns almost daily.
Kourtni Gun with her favourite technology
The hardest part was getting those patterns onto products, and getting the ball rolling with brands wanting to work with me. I barely had any following or experience but eventually I got my art onto a cloth diaper company called Stout House Diapers. They ended up using 8 of my designs, and it was so cool when I finally got them in my hands and got to use them on my baby girl!
Once I had my third child, life got extremely busy and I just didn’t have a ton of time to sit down and paint anymore, so I bought myself an IPad. Once I started digitally drawing, it changed everything for me. The process is just so much faster, and I don’t have to sit down and get all my paints out and get into a creative flow. I can just pick it up for 10 minutes when I have time and come back to it whenever I need to. It was definitely a learning curve at first but once I got the hang of it I fell absolutely in love! I do still paint sometimes, and I think that one day when my kids are older I will go back to painting more, but for this season of my life digital drawing just makes more sense!
Balancing creativity with my personal life has gotten more and more challenging since having my third child. My oldest daughter is in school full time, and my in-laws watch my other two kids once a week, so that is when I get a lot of work done! I spend a lot of late nights working and sneak things in during nap time. I find that I spend a lot less time creating lately, and more time doing behind the scenes work like uploading, editing and packing orders. As my children get older I know I’ll have more time to create so for now I just do what I can and try to enjoy my time with them while they’re young!
My creative process really depends on what I’m working on, but most of the time I draw my elements in Procreate on my iPad, then I upload them into Illustrator and arrange them into a pattern. I take a ton of photos of flowers, plants and mushrooms for inspiration, and sometimes turn to the internet for reference photos. I usually convert my elements to vector so that I can play with the colours and so that the design can be scaled to any size, but I also sometimes work with raster elements.
Kourtni Gunns' art is wrapping paper
Aside from licensing my designs to brands, I also put my designs on products myself and sell them on Etsy, wholesale on Faire, and at markets! My products include gift wrap, greeting cards, art prints, swaddle blankets, stickers and Swedish dishcloths! Etsy is where I started selling my stuff, but I find that with it being a very saturated platform that my sales aren’t as high as I'd like them to be. I started selling wholesale last year on Faire, and it has become a huge part of my business now, which is something I really didn’t expect! It has been really cool to see my products in stores all over Canada and the USA.
I find that when I advertise on my Instagram account I have a lot more success than doing paid advertising through Etsy. When it comes to licensing I am usually the one reaching out. I am constantly taking screenshots of brands that I come across that I’d like to work with, and then I sit down every few weeks and send out emails to the brands. I usually will attach a link to my website and portfolio, but I always include a few JPEGs of my work just to catch their attention. To be honest, most brands either say no or don’t reply, but every once in a while it lands me a deal! Rejection is just a part of this business and my designs are not always going to be for everyone, and that’s okay! I sometimes do have brands reach out to me, and that’s always very exciting. Last year Villager Puzzles reached out to me wanting to put my Mushroom Forager illustration onto a puzzle, after I had actually created that design specifically to be on a puzzle! That was a really exciting moment for me in my art career, and now I’ve done 3 puzzles with Villager (one of which will be out this fall!).
My advice for other creatives would be to just keep putting yourself out there, and to not let rejection get you defeated. I started out only wanting to do surface pattern design and to license my work, but over time I’ve realized that multiple revenue streams are really necessary for me to make an income. It’s taken a lot of time to build up my business and I’m still not where I want to be, but I keep working at it every day. My tips for selling on Etsy and Faire would be:
1.Have good professional looking photos (I use an IPhone but always in good lighting, or for certain products I use mock-ups).
2. Make sure you are using all of the tags that you can to get found in searches.
3. Advertise on your Instagram page - I have personally found that using paid ads on IG has gotten me more sales than ads on Etsy.
4. Make sure you use a descriptive title - I often do a title then a comma, then a similar title with different wording (example - Eco-Friendly Dishcloth, Swedish Dishcloth)
5. Add new products as often as you can! The more you have in your shop the better!
If you’d like to follow along on my creative journey, you can follow my on Instagram @kourtnigunn.art, and if you’d like to see what sort of stuff I have for sale and in my portfolio, you can find links to all of that on my website www.kourtnigunnart.com
I love to follow other creatives and people that inspire me so I would love to connect online!