Your full name
Susan Fox Rusnak

If you have a bachelor degree/education background; what is it?
I have no art education beyond high school.  Which is not to say I dislike the idea, just that it’s mostly an issue of money.  Also, I’m extremely lazy.

Tell us about you.
I’m 27, a Cleveland girl living in Hawaii, introverted, insulated and enabled by the internet (as local artists making non-Hawaiian-themed art find it hard to succeed).  My husband works for an intelligence agency and I basically play around the house and make arts and crafts for egg money.  Pretty idyllic.

Where are you located?
I’ve lived on Oahu for more than five years.

What do you do when you are not producing artwork?
When I’m not drawing or knitting for fun and profit, I’m cooking, making jewelry, hiking the lovely mountains, swimming, spending time with my family and rereading Calvin & Hobbes anthologies.

What drove you to become an illustrator?
Since I almost never draw for money, I can’t really be called an illustrator.  What drives me to draw is a love for people and the medium.  Other artists’ work inspires me and makes me want to do new things.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawing.

How do you promote/sell/showcase your work?
My main gallery is with DeviantArt, which provides really convenient copyright protection in exchange for a lot of censoring and the freedom to reproduce your art as they see fit, which I’ll bet money will never happen.  I sell prints of my art through RedBubble, which is not a great moneymaker but provides very nice prints to the people who want them.  Etsy, on the other hand, is a fabulous moneymaker for artisans and has given me a proprietary sense of accomplishment.

What are your ways to balance work and life?
My work — that is to say, the things I enjoy doing which occasionally make me enough money for more yarn and a tank of gas — is basically my life.  Beyond that, I’m a housewife, which I very much enjoy.  Very privileged and very unglamorous.

A great illustrator is…
… someone whose work is visually, emotionally enduring.  Someone skilled, who pushes himself to constantly progress.

Who is an illustrator that you look up to? Why so?
My favorite professional illustrators are artists like Graeme Base, Chris Van Allsburg and Quentin Blake; children’s book illustrators whose work inspired me all my life.  Their work is very different but incredibly memorable.  Fascinating.  They’re storytellers, and that is, actually, the very best quality an illustrator can have.

What do you think about the Internet and how it is affecting the visual communication business?
Surely, the internet has made it so that any schmoe housewife can share her art, inspire others and be inspired, and have her work be appreciated without necessarily having it hang in some gallery in Seattle or slapped on a building under cover of night.  Anyone with the ability can be recognized for it, and i like that.  I love that.

What music are you to listening lately?
The Black Keys.  Roots Manuva.  I’m discovering all the early Beatles albums I never listened to as a kid, Please Please Me, A Hard Day’s Night and that.  My father, a musician and adventurer in music, likes to make me really awesome mixed CDs.  A little bit of everything.

How is the global economic recession affecting the industry, or at least affecting your business/ work?
I hadn’t started my Etsy shop until the recession was already under way, so it didn’t really affect me.  I can only assume it would be harder for artists now than before.

Name 3 your favorite art books.
Embarrassingly, I don’t really have any art books.  I have shelves full of children’s books, which contain most of my favorite art, and my favorite of those are King Bidgood’s In The Bathtub by Audrey and Don Wood, The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base, and The Arrival by Shaun Tan.

What do you like the smell of?, i.e. coffee brewing, morning grass, etc. Why so?
Clover in the field.  Lilacs.  Snappy winter air.  Autumn leaves.  Ozone during a thunderstorm.  All these things are from Ohio, things we don’t have here in Hawaii.  My heart hurts just writing them down.

If you have online portfolio (website/awards/credits/client’s showcase), what is the URL?
DeviantArt: http://lily-fox.deviantart.com
RedBubble: http://torreadora.redbubble.com
Etsy: http://gingerhaole.etsy.com

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