The Art Coaching Club Podcast

On the Art Coaching Club podcast, Danielle Hayden of Kickstart Accounting, Inc. breaks down money management for artists, especially those navigating fluctuating income. 

Drawing from her own background as a creative, Danielle shares how to establish a rhythm for reviewing your finances weekly, monthly, and quarterly. She emphasizes the foundational role of accurate bookkeeping, recommending QuickBooks Online and advising creatives to hire an expert for this important task. 

Danielle introduces the concept of a 'money team' — your bookkeeper, tax accountant, business coach/CFO, and you as CEO — and explains the three key numbers every business owner...

Host Hayley White shares her Instagram strategy for artists, emphasizing that while Instagram can be a powerful tool, it's not the only path to growth. She explains why artists often gravitate to Instagram despite other effective channels like galleries, designers, and newsletters. Hayley breaks down her "Instagram playbook" into three essential content types: 40% top-of-funnel content for views (like trending audio or memes with an art spin), 40% useful content for saves and shares (teaching, solving, or resonating), and 20% "you content" (your face, voice, story) to build trust and drive sales. She stresses that you need all three types to convert...

A year ago, Lucy Camp was painting before work and on weekends, quietly wondering if a full-time creative career was even an option. Now she’s full-time, fresh off her first in-person show, and prepping for a solo show with Ann Irwin Gallery this December. In this episode, Lucy walks us through what finally made her take the leap: a strong gut instinct, a viral trial reel that hit a million views, and a friend's simple question, “You know you can just be an artist, right?”

We talk about her sustainable Instagram approach for artists, including posting short...

Katie Brown returns to the podcast, sharing how much has changed since our last chat! She opens up about the whirlwind of the past two years: welcoming her second child, Sadie, building a dream studio over her detached garage, and a major pivot in her creative path. Katie details the intense experience of working with five prominent art galleries simultaneously, including Well + Wonder, Campbell Collective, Shane and Greg Irby, and Gallery Orange. She candidly discusses the overwhelming pressure, battling postpartum anxiety and depression, and the realization that she was burning out trying to meet demands while raising two young...

Caroline and Bex have been best friends since before they were born, literally, their moms knew each other first. So when Caroline fell in love with mahjong two and a half years ago and Bex was working as a fashion illustrator in New York doing live events for brands like Jimmy Choo and Vogue, the idea for The Gilded Shuffle wasn't some calculated market gap they spotted. It was a coffee morning, a mahjong lesson, and Caroline saying out loud that she wished more artists were designing tiles.

On this episode we get into how they turned...

Elizabeth Rees started Chasing Paper because she wanted a wallpaper company that worked for her.  In this episode we talk about how she built that into a real business, and about the part of her model that makes her a genuinely interesting guest for this audience, she doesn't just sell wallpaper, she licenses other people's art onto it.

We get into what that partnership actually looks like from both sides, using her collaborations with Liz Lidgett and Meredith Kinney as real examples. We discuss growing a business, challenges that come with that, lessons learned along the way a...

* I️ misspoke when announcing the Club - spots are open from September 16th - the 24th!  

Jennifer M. Walker is a St. Louis-based painter who's been selling her work for three and a half years, and in the last year has found real traction with botanicals, even though her heart still wanders toward abstract work and patterned framing. In this conversation, she walks through the actual trajectory of her career: painting quietly at home after leaving a corporate job, a studio that came with the house she and her husband bought, a two-year adoption journey that turned pai...

This is the final episode in our three-part series on working with interior designers, and it covers the part almost nobody talks about: what happens after the project ships. You landed the commission, she loved the piece, everyone's happy — and then six months go by and you haven't heard a word. 

I get into why that happens (it's usually not personal, she's just busy and juggling a dozen projects) and what to do about it: building a real re-engagement strategy that lives in her inbox instead of your Instagram feed, why install photos are the best marketing lev...

This Friday's replay is my conversation with Katherine Corden, a fine artist in Traverse City, Michigan, known for her expressive figures and color work, who got here by easing out of a career as a physical therapist rather than leaping. She started her art Instagram the week she graduated PT school, and eight years later, that side project has become a full-time business complete with an Anthropologie partnership, gallery representation, and licensing deals.

We talk through what she learned in Emily Jeffords' first-ever mastermind cohort, why she never discounts her original paintings, and how she runs a...

Welcome back to part two of my three-part series on working with interior designers. This one picks up after the designer has already said yes, and it's all about what happens next. I start with a story from my time at Fritz Porter, the to-the-trade studio in Charleston, and what it taught me about why the same designers kept coming back again and again: because we were easy to work with. That's the whole episode. 

I get into why being easy to work with matters more than almost anything else once you've got your foot in the d...

This Friday's replay is my conversation with Eden Flora, an artist and registered art therapist in Oxford, Mississippi, whose collection-based approach to art has grown into a business built on teaching, licensing, and a lot of hard-won reinvestment.

Eden walks through how her fabric design degree and her master's in art therapy from Pratt both shaped how she works today, how she builds a collection around an idea she's personally sitting with, and how art licensing, something she says almost nobody talks about, has quietly become a steady source of income. We also cover why she's shifted...

Welcome to Part 1 of our series on working with interior designers! For artists, understanding how to connect with these professionals can truly transform your business. In this episode, I share my insights from years as an artist and working for firms like Courtney Agosti Interior Design, plus coaching many of you. We're covering everything you need to know before you land that first project.

I'll explain why being memorable is key, drawing on examples like a fabric vendor's unique packaging and artist Shelby Hamilton's studio proximity. Learn my top recommendation for initial outreach: a compelling PDF portfolio...

This is a fan favorite replay, and if you missed it the first time, now's your chance. I sat down with Ashley Ford of Pretty Penny Accounting, who works specifically with women-owned and creative businesses, and this conversation answers nearly every financial question I had when I started my art business.

We walk through the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant, when it's actually time to hire one, what artists can legitimately write off, why you need a separate business bank account sooner than you think, and how to make sense of sales tax, 1099s, and...

Season two starts with one of my favorite conversations yet, with Brynn Casey, a Georgia-based artist known for her coastal and water-inspired paintings. We talk about her years apprenticing under Brit Bass Turner, why trying oil paint after a decade in her signature style feels almost forbidden, and the marriage metaphor she uses for the seasons of a creative career, some fireworks, some grind, all worth it.

We also get practical: why Instagram doesn't convert the way it used to and what Brynn's doing about it, including a Pinterest strategy pulling 40 percent of her web traffic, how...

It's a Friday fan favorite, so today I'm resurfacing one of the episodes y'all keep coming back to: my interview with Chad and Daisy of Studio Giclée in Wilmington, North Carolina. These two are the real deal — Daisy's a painter who studied art and interior design, and Chad grew up working in his family's print shop in Nebraska before spending over a decade doing color correction in LA, including for TV and film. Put those two together and you get a print shop that only works with artists, which changes everything about how they approach a print.

W...

Yes, it's August. Yes, we're talking about Christmas. Stick with me, because the artists who do holiday well aren't the ones scrambling in November, they're the ones who planned in the summer.

Today I'm walking through the framework I use with my coaching clients to think about holiday sales: seeds versus money makers. Money makers are your originals, commissions, and bigger bespoke pieces. Seeds are the giftable stuff, ornaments, calendars, small prints, cards, and their real return isn't the sale price, it's the marketing. A seed sits in a stranger's home for years, doing the kind of...

Pricing is probably the question I get asked more than anything else — right behind shipping tips. So to close out this three-day series and kick off season two, we're talking about how to actually price your art.

I'm walking through the pricing mistakes I see most often — giving work away "for exposure," panic-discounting during a slow month, pricing off materials alone, copying someone else's price sheet, underpricing commissions just to land the client — and what those mistakes really cost you over time: a hole that's brutal to climb out of, galleries and shows that pass you over, and th...

Most artists think their ideal buyer is some hyper-rich woman sitting in a castle, waiting to click purchase. She's not. Your real buyer is closer to you than you think — she's the person who splurged on something last month she didn't need, saved all year for a piece she loved, or bought herself a gift she didn't feel like explaining to anyone. Art isn't a commodity only the wealthy buy. It's belief, desire, and a luxury people find a way toward even when the math doesn't quite work.

In this episode I'm breaking down what's actually happening in...

Season two is here, and yes, I know season one somehow ran 250-something episodes and this is still "season two." We're not overthinking it. I took the spring and summer off, and I'm back with a shift: fewer interviews, more solo episodes built around one thing — growing a real, sustainable art business. The interviews aren't gone, and there are 200-plus of them in the archive if you want another artist's story to pair with these. But the weekly focus now is practical, walk-away-and-do-it advice, not just inspiration.

This episode is part story, part reckoning. I tell you ab...

Lindsey McCord paints under the name Lindsay Crafter, a nickname a boss in New York gave her years ago when she was rigging marshmallows from ceilings for Target and L'Oréal events. She got there through fashion school, event production, ghostwriting, prop styling, basically every creative job that existed, and it wasn't until she had her daughter in 2020 that painting became the thing she actually built a business around, posting one piece at a time while the baby slept.

This conversation goes deep on the parts of running an art business that don't show up on Instagram. L...

This week's Friday replay is with Brittany Smith, and it's one of my favorite conversations about what actually happens between "I started painting again for myself" and "I have a thriving art business." Brittany's path wasn't linear. She turned down a scholarship to SCAD to stay close to family, had a life-altering year in college, once planned to move overseas to teach jewelry-making to women coming out of human trafficking, and ended up instead raising three young kids, one with special needs, before she ever opened an Etsy shop in the summer of 2019. Her first sale, to a total...

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In this episode, I sit down with Ekaterina "Kat" Papova, artist, founder of Create Magazine, and creator of The Art Queens community, to talk about the messy, unglamorous path from making art in your dorm room to running a real business around it. We swap stories about our earliest Instagram days, the websites we obsessed over and rebuilt a dozen times, and the moment we each realized that waiting for the "perfect" setup was just another way of stalling. Kat shares how she built Create Magazine and The Art Queens out of a genuine hell-yes moment, and how she...

This week's rewind takes us back to one of my favorite conversations, with watercolor artist, live wedding painter, and podcaster Paige Lindsey. Paige got laid off in March 2020 and turned that gut-punch into Paige Lindsey Design, but the real story starts years earlier, with a BFA program that left her feeling like a failure and a paint-and-sip studio that taught her more about running a business than art school ever did.

We get into all of it. The scholarship trip to Italy that gave her the confidence to come home and start over. How markets, workshops, and...

We're bringing back a favorite from the archives! This week, we're replaying Episode 26, featuring artist Megan Daisy Milner. Even though this conversation originally aired years ago, the insights are just as relevant today.

In this episode, Megan shares her journey as an artist, how she expanded her business into textiles and wallpaper, the importance of professional photography in building an art brand, and how she balances motherhood with running a successful creative business.

Whether you're discovering this episode for the first time or giving it another listen, we hope you'll find inspiration and practical advice...

Fan Favorite Friday Replay

This week, we're bringing back one of our most-loved conversations with artist and entrepreneur Adam Trest.

In this episode of The Art Coaching Club Podcast, I sit down with Mississippi-based artist Adam Trest to explore how he transformed his distinctive, pattern-rich artwork into a thriving creative business that extends far beyond the canvas.

Adam shares his journey from traditional fine art and portrait painting to developing a recognizable style that now lives across products, licensing partnerships, fabric collections, tile designs, and more. Along the way, he offers candid insights...

This week I'm revisiting my conversation with Catherine Dolaher, founder of CD Arts Management, and honestly it holds up. We talk about what an artist manager actually does day to day, how Catherine went from working with Riley Sheehy to building her own management company, and why the gap left by galleries has created a real need for this kind of behind-the-scenes support. We also get into the in-person sales trend that's quietly moving a lot of work right now, why three great designer relationships can outperform forty, and the one investment Catherine says artists need earlier than they...

Katie Brown grew up in a small town, pursued art in college despite every practical concern, and then spent years taking detours through anxiety and real estate before she found her way back to painting for good.

In this conversation, Hayley sits down with the Greenville, South Carolina-based artist to talk about what it actually took to build a thriving creative career. Katie shares how she developed a style that is distinctly hers, how she built a social media presence that opened real doors, and how she landed gallery representation with Well and Wonder, Shane Gallery, and...

What does it actually look like to take your art business seriously on social media? Maddie Grace Maierhofer knows.

In this episode, Hayley sits down with the Savannah-based artist whose joyful, colorful work and daily posting habit transformed her creative career in under a year. Maddie went from 40K to over 160K Instagram followers, built consistent monthly sales, and landed a collaboration with SMEG USA along the way.

They talk about what posting one reel a day actually did for her business, how she balances commissions and creative energy without burning out, what she does...

This Friday Rewind is one of your all-time favorites — and for good reason.

In this episode, I sit down with artist Kirsten Williams to talk about what really happens between starting out and selling out collections. We cover finding your style (and why it takes longer than you think), building a sustainable art practice, and learning how to treat your creative work like a real business — without losing the joy of making.

Kirsten shares her journey from a 15-year career in marketing to becoming a full-time artist, how years of experimentation led to a breakthrough series...

Welcome to Fan Favorite Fridays — a replay series where I reshare the most-loved episodes from The Art Coaching Club podcast, especially for newer listeners or longtime fans who want a meaningful re-listen.

This week’s rerun features Meredith Kinney, and it’s one you really loved when it first aired.

In this conversation, Meredith shares her journey from a long career in graphic design and branded environments to building a fine art practice rooted in botanicals, pattern, and visual storytelling. We talk about how her background in large-scale design informs her work today — and how she’s th...

This Fan Favorite Fridays episode features Julia Hetzel discussing how to find your niche. Julia shares her perspective on what it means to 'sell out' in a positive way and the importance of trusting your own work. We explore the journey of identifying your unique space and building confidence in your artistic path. If you're looking to define your voice and believe in your craft, this conversation with Julia Hetzel offers insights into navigating your career. Follow the show for more conversations like this.

Think of Fan Favorite Fridays as a guided rewind: the conversations that still...

Posting this off-schedule because the conversation got too loud to ignore. An emergency drop on copycats in the art world — both flavors of it. The viral DIY-the-painting-yourself video that's been making the rounds, and the bigger, quieter problem of artists copying other artists. I get into how I've navigated this with my coaching clients and gallery artists, the Pinterest misunderstanding that keeps people from marketing their work, why building your business on someone else's style will quietly tank your reputation, and the patience piece nobody wants to hear about. Plus what's coming back in August (yes, including this podcast), th...

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Are you posting consistently on Instagram but still not making art sales?

In this episode of The Art Coaching Club Podcast, I sit down with Neve of Neve Creative Studio — a social media strategist and art marketing expert who helps artists and creative brands scale their visibility and boost sales.

We unpack what’s actually working right now on Instagram for artists — and what might quietly be costing you growth and collectors.

Inside this conversation, we cover:

• Why you may only be attracting other artists (not buyers)
• The difference between aesthetic...

In this episode, I’m joined by Emerson Harmon, founder of The Harmon Edit, to talk about what content creation actually looks like behind the scenes—and why it’s become such a powerful tool for artists and creative business owners.

We dive into how Emerson built her business capturing iPhone video content for wedding planners, interior designers, and creatives, why “content creation” is not the same thing as influencing, and how storytelling—not trends—is what truly drives engagement and sales.

We also talk about:

Why your everyday work is interesting (even if it doesn’t...

In this episode, I’m joined by Atlanta-based abstract artist Lindsay Von Art, who shares her journey from the advertising world to becoming a full-time artist—and how consistency, relationship-building, and trusting her instincts shaped her career.

We talk about finding your voice while putting yourself out there, working successfully with interior designers, and why showing your work in real spaces can completely change how collectors connect with it. Lindsay also shares how Instagram fits into her business today, her thoughts on Pinterest and other platforms, and why she’s expanding into functional art through custom painted lampsh...

In this episode, I’m joined by Kennedy B. Holley (KBH), an artist known for her expressive, layered work and thoughtful approach to building a long-term creative career. We talk about what it really takes to sustain an art practice over time—balancing studio work, life seasons, energy, and growth without burning out or losing momentum.

 This conversation is honest, reassuring, and deeply practical for artists who want longevity—not just quick wins.

Perfect for artists who want to build a career that fits their life, trust their process, and keep showing up to the work.<...

In this episode, we sit down with Walker Antonio, a Virginia-based Filipino-American painter whose work blurs the boundaries between the real and surreal, the physical and psychological. Working primarily on a large scale, Walker's process moves from energetic chaos to deliberate refinement—a philosophy that extends to his remarkable career trajectory.

Just 18 months after graduating from Wofford College with his BA in Studio Art and Art History, Walker has built an impressive professional practice. He shares his unconventional journey from receiving the 2023 Whetsell Family Fellowship to spending 10 months at a ski resort in Germany, and how he qu...

Why do collectors hesitate to buy art — even when they love your work?

In this solo episode of The Art Coaching Club podcast, I’m breaking down why collectors don’t buy art, using real conversations I hear again and again from artists inside The Club and in one-on-one coaching.

If you’ve ever thought:

“People love my work, but they’re not buying”

“Maybe my prices are too high”

“Maybe my art just isn’t good enough”

This episode is for you.

We’ll dig into the art sales psy...