I never could have imagined I’d be where I am today, running a successful art business, teaching thousands of students from across the world and being invited to teach on cruises! You never know where life will take you…

I’m what you’d call ordinary, honestly. I really am. As a child, I was confident in who I was. I loved my own company and felt happiest around my animals and playing outside. My confidence really left me at secondary school. I was more of a follower, not an academic, although I was bright but lazy. I didn’t really do any work, and I laugh and talk about how the only book I read in the run-up to my O-levels was Jilly Cooper’s Riders.

A failed art student at 17, I started my first job as a tea girl in an advertising agency, where I learned the old-fashioned art of paste-up, taught myself to type, and became a typesetter. I stayed in the design business until 2015, when, after taking a degree in business coaching, I became an executive coach and finally started to understand who I was at 45. My job was stressful; I worked away from home a lot, and my marriage wasn’t happy. I had huge debts and found myself needing some kind of outlet to help distract me from my unhappiness. My daughter gave me a colouring book and some pencils for Christmas 2015, and that is when the magic started to happen. I found my creativity and a medium that led me to where I am today.

I’ve always had strong values, the strongest being that of faith—not necessarily in the religious sense, but faith that everything will be okay, that everything will work out somehow. I’ve never been a worrier, and I’ve always been very happy in my own company. When I started drawing, it was never my intention to make a living from it. It was a form of relaxation, and, in fact, at the beginning, I never wanted to draw for other people. I was very happy colouring. A friend asked me to draw their dog, which I did and posted it on Facebook. From that small drawing, I started getting a lot of interest from people who wanted their pets drawn. It snowballed, and by mid-2016, I had so many people wanting portraits that when my sister suggested I become a full-time artist, I already had full bookings for a number of months. On January 1st 2017, I became a full-time artist. It was the most wonderful sense of relief—relief that I didn’t have to commute to work every day, relief that I could be at home in an environment I was so happy in, and utter joy that I could spend my days doing something I truly loved. Fast forward a couple of years, and due to my natural sharing personality, I had made a bit of a name for myself in helping other artists and sharing techniques and tips. I like experimenting, so anything I found that worked, I would share. This was a strategy that, unbeknownst to me, catapulted me into the world of online teaching. I already had a captive audience, and when I launched my Patreon teaching channel, I had people clamouring to join. I remember the day I launched so well. It was February 1, 2019, and I was having a day at a spa with my sisters and cousins. It was a real treat, and I remember checking my phone every now and again to see if anyone had joined. I was totally gobsmacked—that’s a Yorkshire term for amazed—to see that I had upwards of 60-plus people joining me. By the end of the week, I had over 200 members, and the £200 a month extra I was hoping to get from Patreon turned into £2000. This subconscious strategy seems to be in-built in me and is something I use whenever I’m launching something new.

Moving to 2021, I decided I wanted to have my own teaching platform. I didn’t want to have to rely on someone else controlling my customer service, and I wanted a platform that was easy to navigate and that was all mine. After around six months of really hard work, both internally and externally, on 17th September 2021, I launched the Bonny Snowdon Academy. I was expecting around 200 people to join me and again was gobsmacked when over 700 people joined me in my first launch. Three years on, my little company has turned over £2.5 million in revenue, now has an annual turnover of over £1 million, has over 4,000 members, and has enabled me to create a home I am so proud of. I’ve taken on new offices for my employees to work from, and best of all, I have created something that is literally changing people’s lives.

The message I’m trying to put across here is you never know where life will take you, but if you keep an open mind, if you do the work to build your confidence and self-belief, if you trust that things will work out well, who knows where you might be? I’m sitting here deciding on a subject I’ll be drawing during one of two teaching cruises next year. Can you believe it? Me, teaching on a cruise—who’d have thought it? Trust the process, try to stay positive, and above all, steer yourself toward things that make you happy.