It’s the first of June, 2024, and we’ve just asked Sarah Donde about her top five achievements as an artist. Here they are, in her own words:
5. When I found art again in April 2023 after quitting my job that was sucking the life out of me. I had totally forgotten what it was like to feel love and passion for my own life.
4. When I made it my goal to make creating art a habit in May 2023 and followed through because I realised how simply and easily art and ideas came to me. Art for me is a social commentary and I had a lot of society to comment on.
3. In June 2023 I suddenly was making enough art to not have to (financially) rush my next life move. I didn’t have to jump back into a soul-sucking job again? Or at least not anytime soon.
2. In July 2023 my first art reel went viral and I started to feel like, hey? Maybe this is a real viable career that could blow up? In January 2024 I decided to grab life by the horns, move to Amsterdam and to step it up a bit more and commit to sharing myself with the world. By March/April 2024 (I believe because of this, because I leaned into myself more and my desire for adventure and seeing the world and its people, people got to know my personality a bit more and put a face to the art), my art has blown up like I could never have expected and I believe it’s going to be life-changing for me. But I am laying the groundwork now for the day that I take the leap back into a career that is 100% art.
1. Being able to comfortably call myself an artist for the first time in 2024 without cringing or feeling like a fake because I didn’t study art or plan any of this!
Today, Sarah creates doodles and tiny paintings and fun(ny) sketches and detailed landscape paintings, all of which she shares with 101,000 people on Instagram. (don’t blink while you read this, or that number might just have gone up by a few hundred. Or a few thousand.) But it was not easy, and there was no overnight success.
Early Life
When Sarah was very young, her family noticed that she had a talent for and interest in art that was extraordinary; they encouraged and nurtured it, both then and over the years since then. Her late aunt, probably her favourite person in the world, wrote Sarah one last letter before she died of cancer. She said: “I am sure you will make an excellent doctor, but you need to make art. You need to write a children’s book.”
Sarah found that, because of everyone telling her what she should be doing, she became quite defiant and focussed on proving that she could be good at multiple things. She decided that she wanted to be a paediatrician at the age of 11, and started paying more attention to science and maths, working incredibly hard on keeping her grades high while also racking up extra-curricular and sports achievements so as to give herself the best possible shot at becoming a doctor. This pursuit shaped her entire existence in high school. In 2013, however, everything changed.
Sarah was in her penultimate year of high school. During a water polo match, she had difficulty seeing, and thought nothing of it at the time, assuming that she had lost a contact lens in the water. When she reached home, she realised that it was much more serious than she thought; she had suffered a retinal detachment, and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. A few days later, she had to accept the harsh fact that she had lost 75% of the vision in her left eye, and that she would never regain it. She missed the qualifying exams for medical school, and she had to spend a year adjusting to her new reality.
Sarah had always been a hard worker, and that hard work had always made her a top achiever. But everything had changed. Before, she used to read entire books in a day or less. With her new disability, she found that she couldn’t keep her place on the page, and found herself re-reading the same line again and again. As a consequence, her high school had to give her extra time to attempt tests, and her exam papers were printed on A2 sheets (each such sheet has four times the area of the familiar A4 sheet), and needed two desks to hold them. Hard work couldn’t get her to the same place any more; she had a handicap. Even today, she struggles to accept that she has a visual disability, and is unable to own it.
The following year, the same thing happened with Sarah’s right eye, and she had to wear an eye patch for a month, not knowing whether she would retain any vision in that eye afterwards. This was the longest month of her life, as she had to get by with only the 25% in her left eye while being extra careful with her right eye to avoid losing all vision in it.
On the hardest day of the longest month, Sarah sat down and painted. She needed to prove to herself that, even if she had to live with one-eighth of the vision she was born with for the rest of her life, that it would be okay, that she could still make art, that she could still see beauty. She did not rest until she was done.
She created a thing of beauty, and she was soon given good news: after the recovery period, her right eye recovered fully, and she was told that there would be no permanent blindness in that eye.
After high school, Sarah forgot about art again. She ended up studying law and embarked upon a career in legal tech. She still wanted to prove that she had a strategic analytical side to her, and didn’t realise that it was important to do things that she loved, as opposed to doing things that she was good at but didn’t necessarily love. After a while, she felt drained; her career was sucking all the art and creativity out of her, and she experienced burnout and spiralled into a pit of depression and uncertainty about her future.
It was then that Sarah was to find art again. In 2023, she started to listen to people telling her that she was good at art and that she needed to lean into it. Friends and family and strangers had told her the same thing all her life, but she just hadn’t believed it. After all, she had never spent the time to perfect hyper-realism, and she thought that she was not technically very good. When she sat down to create a traditional piece, her brain would go: ‘fuck it, let’s make this fun’. Only in 2023 did she realise that what she was creating was real art, that it was special, and that not everyone had that ability.
The Importance of Art
Sarah didn’t have the easiest upbringing, but she always found solace with her friends, and in art. She used to sit down with her best friend Max at his kitchen table and draw for hours; they created little families of rats in their homes and imagined stories featuring them. On her own, she dreamt up an imaginary fashion brand, and filled her sketchbook with designs for clothes. Even though she’s never been very coordinated as a person, her fine motor skills have always been on point. In Grade 1, she once handed in a test, and her teacher Mrs. Gallagher missed one of her answers because she thought that it was a printed question!
As a child, Sarah was obsessed with drawing roses and flowerpots with flowers in them. Her friend Max pointed out that she’s always written her name on her paintings the same way; here are some examples from her early work:
Sarah’s first two art mentors were both artists who taught her informally. Nan, a Dutch artist in her village, took a lot of interest in Sarah when she was about nine years old, and taught her technical skills like grid work and working with the reference image upside down, about perspective and colour theory. Best of all, she occasionally bribed little Sarah with baked goods and tea. Another artist in the village, Maureen Blake, taught art to all the younger children who were keen. These were a bit more unstructured and social, but nurtured Sarah creatively, where Nan had nurtured her technical skills. She took art as a subject in high school for three years, but this was more focussed on art history and project-based, Sarah remembers her art teachers as being really encouraging, and is grateful for how these classes made her think about the social elements and political elements of art for the first time – specifically in the time she spent studying with Ms Chambers. Works like Jane Alexander’s ‘The Butcher Boys’ were eye-opening to her.
All About Sarah’s Art
Today, Sarah turns slices of her life into soft wholesome drawings and paintings. So many slices of life pass through her unique creative filter and come out transformed:
Relatable everyday things: Doodles featuring food and animals and stick figures and clothes and parks – all these are paired with Sarah’s thoughtful one-liners about things that are happy-making, about pain and mental health and healing through humour, about small annoyances and little joys, and about how life is silly and absurd and wonderful and strange.
Tiny paintings: Primarily in watercolour, and either serving as a window into what Sarah is doing that day, small philosophical musings, or just cute reminders about healthy practices for everyone to follow in their daily lives.
Large intricate watercolour paintings of busy streets, and serene streets, and cute cafés (whose only failing is that they don’t include a map reference), magical sea coasts, a hallway with bicycles parked at the end of it, and a greengrocer’s market; through these, we catch a glimpse of what the world might look like through her eyes.
Geometry. Objects in Sarah’s work are closer (to having oodles of personality) than they appear (in real life). Each circle (for example, when she’s drawing a plate) deviates a little from that which might be drawn using a pair of compasses, but each such deviation brings with it an injection of quirky personality. Lines are always a little askew, and that’s great, because they feel real and vital and imperfectly perfect.
Sarah uses small black lines to great effect. Sometimes they’re tiny lines, just used to add depth and texture to shading. Sometimes they’re tiny lines, but they’re placed to show agitation or dynamic movement. Sometimes they’re big slanted lines showing you that a pane of glass in a corner of a huge detailed sketch is tinted. Sometimes they’re parallel tiny lines of irregular length, and they depict grass in a park. Sometimes they show that fuzzy socks are delightfully fuzzy even more viscerally than the “fuzzy socks” caption does. Sometimes they make pies look like real pies, and you’re torn between wishing the pie was real and appreciating how cleverly the pie / fulfilling corporate job that most people crave metaphor is set up.
Instagram isn’t always interactive. Yes, you can comment and watch stories and vote on occasional polls, but it still usually feels like people posting content and other people looking at it separately. Sarah’s Instagram does several things differently and feels, for the most part, like an interactive community of nice people. Some of her reels are games (often featuring birds, and sometimes getting more views than the entire population of 165 countries), and people end up inundating her inbox with proud screenshots of their attempts to get their ducks in a row or to give a chicken a head. A lot of her posts about daily life things ask questions, and the conversations in the comments are often insightful and thought-provoking. Here are some themes that recur in her work:
Sarah’s art enhances things we see every single day. For example, most of us spend at least one hour on our mobile phones per day (where “one”, of course, means “seven”), and Sarah draws beautiful non-Euclidean phone screens and familiar app logos, all paired with her gently sarcastic commentary on life in a large city as a 20-something with a successful day job and a successful art career. We also see hundreds of faces on a daily basis, and Sarah has a unique and perhaps underused talent where she can draw really funny faces; our favourite is this one.
Almost all of Sarah’s doodles and non-landscape paintings are accompanied by handwritten text, and each letter has character – elegant tails, a slight slant to one side, and the coolest E’s in the known universe. To sum up: all text in Sarah’s drawings is important; it adds so much personality; and there’s even a painting that has only words that still feels like a full painting.
There are many ways to talk about daily life through small sketched doodles that are sometimes painted, and many of them are cynical or dark or clichéd. Sarah’s art is none of those things: it is heartwarming even when it talks about sad things (like having to go through the modern equivalent of kissing frogs by downloading dating apps, matching, being disappointed, and deleting, only to re-download), complex even when it’s simple on the surface, colourful even when it uses black lines on a white surface. The phrase “relatable everyday things” is overused since a lot of sites made it their whole personality, but Sarah restores what the phrase originally stood for, which was to look at universal events and see something profound in them, something meaningful. Like observational comedy paired with existential commentary.
The Creative Process
Given that Sarah creates art in so many different formats, and that all her art reflects all the beauty and most of the quirks of the world, one might think that her creative process is really complex. It’s actually fairly simple, and all her ideas spend their infancy in the Notes app. Sarah always loves her ideas when she keys them in, even if they don’t always make sense months later. For example, she’s still on a quest to unearth the original thought behind one of her more cryptic Notes: ‘drawing with conductor in orchestra’. Today, she has hundreds of Notes tabs, and aims to turn them all into art.
When the time comes, Sarah picks an idea and takes her pen out and starts drawing. After the drawing is done, she paints with watercolour. The final step is adding highlights with a white ink pen. She never makes rough sketches; she prefers to go straight in with confidence, and this approach is reflected in how real her art feels. She can always tell when a performer – a singer or comedian – seems too rehearsed or is lacking in performance, and she thinks that it is the same with art.
The approach is similar even with a more detailed piece – for example, an elaborate landscape painting. There is a reference in this case – either a photo that Sarah herself has taken, or an image sent by a client; but all the other steps are the same. This approach is rooted in how natural it feels for her to create art, and there’s a low barrier to starting a new piece.
Social Media Success
Sarah’s Instagram page is wildly successful. We aren’t telling you how many followers she has because we do not like posting out-of-date information, and the rate of increase means that we would have to edit this article every three seconds. But, at the time of posting, her follower count is just a shade above six digits, and she’s had three reels break the million-view barrier; one of those is all set to surpass a hundred million views. Here are a few things that worked for her:
1. Goal-setting: For much of 2023, Sarah had fewer than 3,000 followers, and she still managed to make a living off of her art. She set a casual goal for herself: to get to 5,000 total followers. That worked almost too well; there are sometimes days when she gets more than 5,000 new followers.
2. Posting everyday: Sarah has found that posting daily has helped her account grow; she sometimes takes a day off once in two weeks, but she doesn’t risk more than that.
3. Understanding and adapting to the algorithm: Sarah uses the analytical and strategic side of her brain to add depth to her Instagram content plan; she researches what works and incorporates the main lessons.
4. Creating original content: Sarah’s art style is unique; her voice is all her own.
5. Gamification: Sarah knows that high-engagement posts are pushed to non-followers by Instagram. Therefore, even though the focus of all her posts is still her art, the format encourages comments, shares, and gamification.
As a rule, Sarah creates and posts at least two reels every week, and fills up the other days with normal feed posts. This works perfectly for her; every time she deviates from this plan, she’s noticed a negative impact on engagement. She tries to post a story every day; this sparks conversations with her most keen followers in her DMs, and this further helps build her audience through dedicated fans. Consistency is key; Instagram has access to all data, and the algorithm recommends active accounts to people similar to those who engage extensively with them.
Sarah has had some followers tell her that seeing her art makes them feel less alone, and that they were going through something very specific, and very difficult. Her post came at exactly the right moment for them to address the pain they were in. When this happens, it makes her very happy; she knows exactly how much it means when something similar happens to her. A lot of her art comes from a highly emotional place, from pain and finding humour and comfort in the pain.
It’s not all roses, though: creating and maintaining a very successful Instagram page brings creatures out of the woodwork. Nasty comments and creepy DMs from strangers are disturbing, but Sarah could probably deal with them in isolation. Unfortunately, they do not happen in isolation; if she is having a bad day or has had to deal with harassment in person, online trolls amplify the effects of real life problems. And, of course, some comments and DMs go beyond anything Sarah could ever have imagined in terms of scary harassment. She deals with it in several ways: sometimes by calling out this unacceptable behaviour on her platform and making art about it, sometimes by talking about it with friends and family.
On a more philosophical level, she reminds herself that this is the world we live in. Of course, she could opt out and choose not to deal with it, but then the trolls would win. She reflects on how lonely and miserable the haters must be to say the things they say. She has never felt the urge to say something remotely negative or creepy to a stranger online, and people who do feel that urge are not worth engaging with. She likes to think of them as the creatures from Monsters, Inc.: they need to collect their allocated screams to power their monster world.
Given that Sarah’s life as an artist has so many dimensions – creating art, managing her page, working with clients, engaging with people who love her work – and that she also has a day job and a life, things could easily spiral out of control, work-wise, if she wasn’t efficient with her time. She has managed, however, to allocate large chunks of time to things that are very important to her by setting boundaries. Even though her phone is constantly blowing up with texts from family, friends, fans, and potential clients, she reduces the insanity by prioritising urgent messages first, and prepping everyone important in her life with the information that she will get to their messages within a week or two; when she devotes her energies towards replying, she uses her time in the best possible way by putting her headphones on, putting her phone in flight mode, and writing replies to unread message threads. In addition, her passion for working smart and being analytical has helped her identify and implement success factors on Instagram, so that she doesn’t have to waste time trying out different experiments.
All this means that Sarah is able to spend a surprisingly low amount of time on Instagram. She is able to live in the moment, to do the things she loves in the real world, to meet her friends, to live her life!
Writing
Sarah has been writing mini-books since she was five years old. Even then, she loved to comment on things she saw and did. By the time she was 8, she was experimenting with different pseudonyms; now, of course, she uses her own name when she creates art, and thinks it’s pretty cool! She’s always written and painted deeply personal and emotional cards for friends, family members, and loved ones on birthdays and important occasions. It’s never generic ‘you’re a great friend’ messages, but really sentimental ones like ‘I love the way you are so fiercely protective of me, how you use your arm to protect me in the car from the driver’s seat when we go over a speed bump.’ Sarah notices moments of love and emotion.
Sarah really wants to write a book one day; she has a strong idea in her head, and she’s already written an outline. She looks forward to drawing from her ability to write about things that exist and talk about feelings that are real, and she’s always had that superpower. Her mom tells her that she was intense even when she was very young, that she felt everything, noticed everything.
Even today, she is able to draw on that power and intensity to add authentic emotion to her writing and art. She notices the slightest change in tone of someone’s voice or texting style. Her propensity for picking up details of other people’s emotions and identifying patterns makes her very good at deep emotional analysis, and enables her to connect with her audience on a fundamental level. She understands that, even though our experiences may be unique, the context and emotion behind those moments are often shared.
People feel less alone when they know that other people have felt the same way they do; a problem shared is a problem halved. Sometimes we need to see something spelled out by someone else to analyse our own feelings; Sarah’s art does that for people.
A lot of writing that seeks to be inspirational makes you want to throw up a little (or a lot). When Sarah talks about how she persevered and earned all the success she’s had in her art career, you’re invested in her story, and her writing draws you in; it’s simple, unembellished, and inspiring. After you read it (for example, the caption of this post), you want to cheer for her while also getting back to that creative pursuit of yours that you’ve left on the backburner for way too long, because you now believe that you can do it too.
The captions that come with Sarah’s social media posts are usually a line long, and they can be witty and funny (so you get two smiles for the price of one post), heartfelt and relatable, or an invitation to interact in the comments of the post. They’re occasionally longer and beautifully written, and make you think and feel.
Her website also has some of our favourite copy on any website ever, including a really really creative and funny About page. (you must stop reading this feature right now and go read it, and then come back here and finish this article, please?) There are also one-liners sprinkled liberally over every page; the Collab With Me page is home to (in our opinion) the best ones.
Sarah is grateful to…
…her family. Even though she initially did not heed their advice to embark on a career in art, their nudges and pushes over time played a large part in ensuring that she picked up the basic skills she needed to eventually succeed as an artist. Her friends and family also gave her the confidence she needed to start, and she gave herself the patience and self-belief to continue. Sarah recognises the role played by people who made her life hell and inflicted pain on her; those people are the reason she has stuff to make art about, and she does not regret the bad things that have happened to her because they are part of her story now.
Links
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dondedraws.
Shopify: https://dondedraws.myshopify.com/collections/original-works.
Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/dondedraws.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dondedraws.