Meet Cindy Bale Tanner

My mother taught me to draw cartoon characters when I was 5 years old. I drew Betty and Veronica cartoons in the margins of my elementary school class otes. I dabbled with watercolor in middle school. I painted Spanish arches and people portraits before college. I loved trying to achieve a great likeness with pencil and watercolor. I did not study art in college.

For 40 years I helped manufacturing business employees make sense of computer business applications as a business analyst, programmer and project manager. I retired in 2017. Then I started doing what I had wanted to do all along!

After two weeks cruising around Japan, I dove into online courses in photography, calligraphy, bullet journaling, drawing, urban sketching and watercolor painting. I joined my local urban sketching group. I started taking in person community college sketching and watercolor courses. Almost immediately, I joined my local art association. In January 2019 I started entering my beginning watercolor paintings in local competitions.

Three years later in 2022 I started winning honorable mention ribbons. In the meantime, I started a pet and people portrait watercolor painting business. Later I had immediate success using Yelp ads to find pet and people portrait clients locally.

In February of 2023, I won a first place ribbon. On the same day (!!!), I released week one of my first online course, “Create Your Own Original Art”™. What a blue ribbon day!

Just one week after “Create Your Own Original Art™” ended, a student, who had friended me on Facebook, was showing and selling her art on social media! I was so proud of her and the work we had done together!

In May 2023 I was compelled to pursue my passion of showcasing women artists to budding artists around the world with “Paint Your Way To…: Women Share Their Lives As Artists In Exclusive Interviews”™. Another edition is planned for later in 2024!

In April 2024, I had the idea to offer the Artist Journey Community, a safe place for a frazzled aspiring artist-to-be to be in community with fellow aspiring artists-to-be who are all brave enough to learn the tools to make original art in their own style every time.