Shownotes
What do you get when you cross retro vibes with ecological magic and throw in some seriously large paintbrushes?
You get Kell Sunshine aka Kelly Spencer – and this conversation will leave you inspired to think bigger (literally).
Kelly is a muralist, letterer, and illustrator from New Zealand who's spent 17 years creating vibrant work that celebrates the interconnectedness of all living beings. Her distinctive style features lush, retro-inspired colour palettes and flowing, curvaceous forms, often centred around soil-sorceress protagonists that embody the earth's wisdom and magic.
With over 250 clients and 50+ murals across six countries, her portfolio spans everything from album covers to tarot cards, gig posters, jigsaw puzzles, and beverage labels.
In this episode, Kelly spills on combining passions, photographing your work, pitching your first mural, what happens when you develop "blank wall syndrome" (seeing mural potential everywhere), her 17-year secret to staying creatively motivated, and finding the willingness to ask "hey, can I paint that?”
Fair warning: after listening, you might find yourself eyeing up every blank surface like it's your next masterpiece waiting to happen.
Connect with Kelly Spencer:
Instagram: @kell.sunshine
Website: kellsunshine.com
–––––––––––
WANT MORE?
Want your questions answered on the podcast, or be part of an awesome community of creatives supporting each other? Join us in the Brand Your Passion Collective at www.makerandmoxie.com/community. We’d love to have you 🧡
🎧 106. How to create a cohesive brand personality as a multi-passionate creative
📰 Join the Moxie Musing newsletter
–––––––––––
CONNECT
📷 Connect on Instagram @makerandmoxie
–––––––––––
DROP SOME LOVE
🎧 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
Transcripts
HOLLIE ARNETT: The voice you just heard is Kelly Spencer, also known as Kell Sunshine. Kell Sunshine is a mural lettering artist and illustrator from the east coast of New Zealand. She's deeply inspired by the interconnectedness of all living beings, and her work is a celebration of this bond. Kell's distinctive creative style features vibrant, retro-inspired colour palettes and flowing curvaceous forms.
Her murals often centre around soil sorceresses, protagonist characters that embody the earth's wisdom and magic. The underlying themes of her murals and illustrations highlight ecological awareness with the aim of inspiring viewers to share her reverence for the natural world. I have been a huge fan of Kelly since I started as a hand lettering and typography artist myself. I was always inspired by her work, and so getting to talk to her today was really fun and exciting. I was so excited to hear about how things had evolved since I started following her so many years ago.
In this episode, you are going to learn how to get started with murals if you want to start painting big, the power of following your interests, why good quality images of your work are so important, how to stay motivated and inspired as an artist for so long, why connecting and collaborating is so key to creative business, and so much more. So if you are ready to get started, let's dive in and hear from Kell Sunshine. Welcome to the show, Kelly. I'm so happy that you are here.
KELLY SPENCER: Thank you so much for having me!
HOLLIE ARNETT: Of course. We were just chatting before about the fact that you and I have been in each other's online circles for a long time. For the people who haven't heard of you before and don't know that much about you, can you tell us a little bit about how your business started and how you started getting into hand lettering and illustration and all of that?
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah, absolutely. So this all started about maybe 17 years ago. I had always been creative, but hadn't grown up in an era where it was super encouraged to pursue art as a career. The nineties were a different time than what they are now. And so sometime in my early twenties, it came to my attention that illustration was this thing that people overseas were doing. I was travelling at the time – I was in Central America.
The thing is, it was never exclusively that I wanted to pursue art as a career. It was that I wanted to pursue travelling, and art was a way to enable that. So that was this pivotal moment where the two things combined was like, "Hey, I can do this travel thing if I'm freelance. Therefore, I'm just going to decide that I'm a freelance designer now." So it stemmed from that, but the two kind of happened at the same time, so it was pretty fluid, it seemed that way at least.
I initially got into graphic design and illustration for gigs and theatre productions and all sorts of cool Wellington stuff. And that evolved. The illustration really started to pursue hand lettering as seemingly fortuitously people got really into hand lettering at the same time that I realised that lettering was a skillset in its own. It had just been something I'd always done. I didn't know it was a thing.
Got into that, and that led on to doing sign painting on the side. And then all of these things culminated in murals probably seven or eight years ago. It was like, "Cool, this is all really fun, but what's more fun is doing it really big," and that's what I do now. I no longer do graphic design, but I'm still doing illustration and murals, and then typography is the thing that crosses both worlds.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, amazing. I love that what you love to do, which is creating and designing and illustrating and hand lettering, enables you to do something else that you really love, which is travelling. The combination of those is so perfect. And I love that. So did you go to school for illustration or design or anything like that? Did you just learn by yourself? Tell me how you got better as an illustrator and hand lettering artist.
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah, I do not have a university degree in any of this. I did a six-month course when I first moved to Wellington forever ago. I did a six-month course through polytech – something like "digital something," I can't remember. For me, that was like an accountability thing because I was moving to Wellington. I was like, "Cool, I'm moving to the city. I want to pursue this illustration thing." And I signed up for the course to get a bit of a better idea about the Adobe Suite really, but also just something to hold me there, make me accountable and give me a push to start from. So yeah, I learnt some of the digital stuff there, and the rest I learnt by doing and hoping for the best.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah. And I mean it's obviously worked, so that's great. I think now, especially, a lot of artists think – earlier it was probably more of a traditional thing to go to school, go to design school or art school or whatever. But now there's so much you can learn just from, like you said, doing, or from online things, learning from your peers. All of that stuff can help you get better, practice, improve what you want to do. So how did you get your first mural? Because I'm sure there are a lot of illustrators and hand lettering people listening who are like, "I want to paint big. How do I go big?" How did that happen?
KELLY SPENCER: The first mural – it depends on what scale. So early on I would do, you know those chorus boxes that I think councils run? That was maybe where I started dabbling with something giant – they're just a big canvas.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah. For anybody listening who isn't maybe from New Zealand and doesn't know, they're like a power box. And they started working with artists to get them to actually look nice.
KELLY SPENCER: They're about two metres square or something. That was one of the things I did early. I was lucky to share a studio with a bunch of friends and I would get my friend Sean to take me out painting because he'd always been doing street art since forever. And I was like, "Whatcha doing? That looks fun. Show me the ways."
But I think more worth noting in this context is the first quite large scale one that I did. It was a self-initiated project, so I'd been lucky enough to just paint at Sea Walls Festival in Napier. That was, I think, 12 by 4 metres and I was like, "Oh my God, it's so big." And they were like, "It's fine, don't worry about it." And straight after that I was just trying to do more.
And there was this site down at the marina in Wellington that was a big plain white wall. And I got in touch with the arts lead at council and said, "What can I do here? This is your wall. I want to paint it." She was really amazing – Katie, she probably still works in that role – and said, "Yeah, you should do it and you're not doing it for free, so we're going to get some funding." Of course, we went down that route and did it all properly.
So as far as people getting into their first walls, self-initiated projects are great. You don't have to wait for somebody else to ask you to do it. And that was maybe a lucky site because it was council-owned and I was able to do something relevant – a Hector's dolphin, which is native to New Zealand. And that was amazing. And I still love that piece. I still feel really good about that piece because of being so excited about doing this large scale work and getting it done.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, and I love that you were like, "I want to do this. How do I do this?" And just went out and asked questions and made it happen. That's amazing. Just ask. Is that something you still do? Reach out when you see a spot, reach out and say, "Can I do that?"
KELLY SPENCER: Not as much as I'd like to. It's something that I want to be doing because you end up with blank wall syndrome – you see cool sites everywhere. But the reality is there's always client work that's needing to be done, so that stuff often gets put by the wayside.
For example, there's a wall here – so I live on the east coast now, which is where I grew up, moved back four years ago. I found this wall and it was in this walkway. I used to have this recurring dream of this walkway being like a magical portal to another jungle world. Never forgotten it, never knew if it was real or not. Found the walkway again, and there's this wall there that I really want to paint. So I got permission and I still haven't done it. And that was four years ago.
HOLLIE ARNETT: You've got the permission, so they're probably like, "Yeah, just go back there."
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah. That's great. Maybe this decade.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah. We'll look forward to seeing if and when you get to that one. So like you said, you are busy with lots of client work now. I've seen some examples of things that you have worked on like print ads, jigsaw collaborations, t-shirts, store fit-outs. I saw you had a – I think it was Bailey Nelson – store fit-out. Things like that. So how has that side of your business kind of evolved? How do you get those client projects? Tell me about that side of things.
KELLY SPENCER: I know it's not the answer everyone wants to hear, but the magical world of word of mouth is how I've always got my work. I ended up putting a form eventually on my website with a column that asks, "How did you hear about me?" because I was so curious after so many years. And some of it actually is Google search, but we live in New Zealand – it's a tiny village of a country – so a lot of that client work has always come through word of mouth, somebody knows somebody and has passed it on.
HOLLIE ARNETT: That's amazing. Is there anything that you do or have done to encourage that more? Or does it just naturally happen?
KELLY SPENCER: I hear of people doing outreach and that sounds like a really great idea. I think I've tried a couple of times. I don't know if anything's come to fruition. Yeah. It's just staying visible seems to help, and we have everybody's favourite platform to do that on – Instagram.
Murals – I see murals as each piece is a business card for the next one. Illustration is great, but it doesn't always necessarily mean that your name is known for the thing that you did because a lot of it's commercial or, as you say, food and beverages. So it's kind of each thing that I do feeds into the next one.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, I noticed that one thing that you do really well on social media and on your website is that you have great photos of, when you do a mural or any of your work, you have great photos, you take videos of things. How important is that? How has that helped by having good quality images of your work, especially if it's going to be like the business card for the next one?
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah, that's always been really important to me. Part of the reason why I don't fully hate using Instagram is because I grew up around photography. My mum and dad were into photography when I was little. We had this cool photography studio in the house, which I wasn't old enough to use before it was gone. But I always documented everything since I was a little kid. I remember Mum letting my brother and I have our first reel of film, which we absolutely wasted on God knows what. But it's really instinctive to me to take nice photos of things.
So I still have a lovely DSLR camera that, if there's not a professional photographer around, I'll still make sure that I get as many nice photos of my work as possible. I want to see it presented in the best way that it can be presented. I guess my phone doesn't – it's not good enough. I've tried getting a fancier iPhone some years ago, but it's still not fancy enough. It never will be.
And now, there is for sure a part of feeding the algorithm what it likes to snack on, and so the little videos of the brush strokes – people really enjoy watching those big, long, fat brush strokes.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Like satisfying clean strokes. So nice.
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah. But I love making them as well, so it's not a tough sell to capture that stuff. I'm drooling while I'm painting it myself. I'm like, "Oh yeah, and I should video this too," which doesn't make the brush stay any straighter, but it's an extra little challenge. Try and hold the phone up whilst you're making the brush stroke. But yeah, I enjoy capturing that stuff and, as far as marketing goes, showing the work the best they can be.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah. And I think people stress about having the perfect feed or looking a certain way or whatever, or doing graphics or anything, but just having good quality photographs or good quality videos allows those to just speak for themselves. If anybody listening goes and looks at Kelly's Instagram, there's not all these intense design graphics or anything like that. It's literally just good quality images and videos of your work. And that speaks for itself. So I think it definitely is a good strategy, a good approach.
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah, cool. That's nice to hear. Thank you.
HOLLIE ARNETT: You're welcome. So other than social media, and obviously you've said word of mouth is a huge thing, are there any things you've done outside of social media to market your business or make those connections? Just other things that have worked well for you outside of social media?
KELLY SPENCER: Other than existing for a long time, no. I wish I could give some hot tips on secrets behind the scenes, but it's just existing. I'm relatively extroverted, mostly, not always, but being present, knowing people. I by no means would call it networking – I can't even remember the word for it. But for sure, all those years in Wellington helped. I was going to gigs, I knew a lot of people that were in the entertainment scene and therefore people that are in the hospitality scene. And so a lot of early work came in through those avenues.
That was time and place, right? I don't think it would've been as easy if I had been here on the east coast back then. I think being in the city did help for those early years. However, that doesn't mean that's relevant advice now because the internet wasn't what it was then, and it's a different world. I don't know what it would be like to get started.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, I think definitely swings and roundabouts to both. One thing I noticed as well on your social media and everything is that – not networking, but it seems like you collaborate with lots of people, right? Even when you're doing a mural, there's other people helping you paint or you're tagging all these other people in things you're working on. So even if someone's getting started now and they're not necessarily connecting, collaborating, involving other people – all of that seems to be helpful.
KELLY SPENCER: It's what being human is all about. It's just that connection with other people. And there's always, in every project, there's so many people that are behind it that have been instrumental in some way. On a festival, that's a lot of people who are absolutely looking after artists – a community of people, not just the client that are being instrumental.
And I think the one that you've seen recently was one that we did a few weeks, maybe a month ago, where it was full community paint-by-numbers. We got all the outlines up and then we invited anyone who wanted to paint to come and paint. And that's so fun. It's hectic. Next time I think we'll work to have more volunteers on hand to help, but yeah, it's "You want a colour? Okay. Use a paintbrush," and it was full on. But it got done and it's delightful watching other people who don't always get to hold a brush and put paint on a wall and being allowed to do it without getting in trouble. That's a really specific kind of joy, seeing other people have that experience.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah. That's really fun. I love that. Just inviting people to come along is really fun. And another thing that I guess ties into that is that you are also part of – I don't know what you call it – a group, a collective called the League of Live Illustrators, right?
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah. So tell me about that and working with a group of other illustrators.
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah. LOLI. We call it LOLI. That's an acronym. LOLI is a magical little beast that seemingly happened by accident. We're in our 10th year now. What LOLI does is we go to conferences and events around New Zealand and we capture conversations live through illustrations. It stems from graphic facilitation where people are doing those kind of quick-fire illustrations and portraits with text, but it's a little bit different from that wherein we're doing quite a lot of synthesis to really pull out what the gems are of the conversation and turn it into a full illustration.
We then give back to the attendees and the presenters, and people are able to see their voices heard, and they're also able to look at the conversation from a synthesised perspective. That is also our perspective. So we are able to sit slightly outside and go, "Hey, here's what you guys are talking about. Here's what's important." And it just works. It just works really well because most humans don't want to read words, they don't want to read notes. That's boring.
So we started doing it at a couple of conferences 10 years ago. It took off. Same deal – people that go to conferences organise conferences. So for LOLI, again, we've just been incredibly fortunate that people have loved what we're doing. It's really resonated with people. We get the most beautiful conversations with attendees afterwards. They're like, "Hey, wow, thank you. That makes a conference more exciting to go to." And yeah, so we're a group of five friends. We're essentially siblings at this point. And we're incredibly lucky to get to work together and we hope that we'll be doing it for many years to come. We're having anniversary celebrations at the moment.
HOLLIE ARNETT: That must be – yeah, that's very cool. Because I think being an artist sometimes can be a little bit lonely or isolating, or being a freelancer in general – you're working on your own. So to have something like that where, not all the time, but every now and again, you're working with a group of your friends or people that you love to collaborate with is really fun and really nice.
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah. We're so lucky and we know it. And we make sure we get some deep hang times that are not just business once a year at least.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, that's good. That's important. So we've talked a lot about your marketing and all that sort of stuff. I'd love to just quickly go over your visual identity because we haven't really talked about that. And obviously now your branding is mostly your work doing the work of your brand, but you also have a really beautiful hand lettered logo, which obviously ties into your expertise. It's your beautiful name written out. So how has that developed, changed over time? Have you done any specific work on it? Tell me about your visuals.
KELLY SPENCER: For me, my work's always been about speaking for the natural environment, so that's all of the species that are not humans that support this world that we have the privilege of living in. So that's plants and animals and everything else around them. That kind of is my brand. These are the things that I care deeply about. It's really important to me to use my work as a voice for encouraging people to acknowledge the beautiful system within this planet that we're sharing with a bunch of other species.
And I'm not somebody that has a logo, but I hand-letter my name. I was like, years ago I was like, "That will do," because otherwise I'll never have a logo because I'm into lettering, so I'd have to change it every six months. But that in itself – the things that I care deeply about is my art. And so it's not able to be separated, but that's what I do and that's how people know my work, and that's what it's known for.
I absolutely love colour, so lush colour palettes speak to people well, which I'm grateful for because choosing colours takes me almost as long as the design. I'm obsessive about it. What else can I say about that? It's been a really interesting evolution where I used to always be painting about animals when I was younger. And then I went through this deep sort of ocean phase where everything was very ocean-related. And then as of the last five years, I've become really focused on land-based plants. I moved home to the east coast, I built a veggie garden. Now I'm painting about vegetables and, oh my God, how far is this going to go?
And as of the last couple of months, I've become really interested in drawing seeds and I really want to see how far I can dig into this – I'm calling it my seed era. So things are cracking open and I want to really dig deep into the galaxy that exists within seeds because they're insane. Some of the formations that plant seeds take on is so interesting. They're so intricate. And I don't know what happens after I do the seed thing, because it feels like then it's just going to be esoteric weird stuff that's intangible. And hey, we'll figure that out when we get there. But yeah, I'm finding it interesting.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, and it's the cool thing about being an artist, right? Is that you have the freedom to follow what you are interested in and what you're passionate about. Obviously outside of client work probably, but that's fun to just let yourself be like, "I'm into seeds right now. I want to explore seeds. Let me just do that" and not worry about whether people are going to like it or whatever.
KELLY SPENCER: Totally. Yeah. And hopefully people want to come along for that ride, right? So far so good.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, no, I love that. And I also love everything you said about the things that you care about and are passionate about being your brand. That makes so much sense because a brand is what people know you for and what people think of when they think of you and think of your work. And so for you it's obviously that connection to animals and plants and nature as well as the actual visual style of your work. And so those things come together to make the Kell Sunshine brand, which is amazing. I love it.
I have one more question and then my last question. So you've obviously, as you said, been doing this 17 years now overall. How do you keep inspired, keep motivated, keep going? Because some people, it feels like they want to give up or it's hard or all those things. How do you keep going? How do you keep inspired and motivated?
KELLY SPENCER: By moving. And I think it's more important than – obviously some people have more of a tolerance for being transient than others, and it's not necessarily nourishing for all, but being transient doesn't need to take on the form of travel. It can be just keeping energy moving. And so I'm quite – I avoid structure for better or worse. I don't know if that serves me or not, but that's how it is, because then I can't stagnate.
And this is the reason why I love travel so much, although it's quite hard for my heart these days because of carbon concerns. But the reason I love travel is because I know that it keeps me alive and I know that variation is going to keep the fire burning inside me. And as long as that fire is well stoked, then creativity can come. It's not necessarily that I'm out looking for things to draw, although that is often the case. But it's just movement and things change and evolve – creating an environment within myself for that change to be able to happen so I can grow.
HOLLIE ARNETT: That's interesting because I am not necessarily the same way – I do love to travel, but I haven't travelled that much. But even in my everyday life, just moving where I'm working. So if I've been working at home in my office forever, going and working at the library or going on a walk or going to a gallery or anything that's not the same place in the same way all the time helps to break that cycle and, like you said, to move that energy around. I think there's probably a scale of movement – do you need to just go outside and touch grass and do something else? Or do you need to go move countries? Who knows? But somewhere in there is something helpful.
KELLY SPENCER: Exactly. Yeah. And it's something different for everybody, but I think it is important for all of us. Change is good. Change is healthy. It doesn't have to be monumental.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Definitely. I love that so much. So I don't know if we're going to get any more incredible magic than that, but what would you say is the biggest lesson that you have learned about branding your passion?
KELLY SPENCER: Yeah. I think it's probably a cliché for a reason, but being your own voice. It's just the only way to be good at being a human, and it's the only way to be good at being an artist is to not try and be someone else's voice. And that's really hard these days, especially with social media. But always trying to come back home to that. Yes, I'd like to draw like that, but I don't – I draw like I draw. And just trying to always lean back into your own voice. I'm sure that you've had so many other guests say the same thing for good reason.
Working out what is important to you and doing that. And that's when I feel the most balanced – the pendulum swinging in the middle there. It's "this is me, this is what's important." And then you're fuelled by that and your best work will hopefully come out. Not always though. Sometimes it's just shit.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Yeah, but that's part of the process too. Absolutely. That is incredible. And even if people have said that before, it's amazing to hear how you have felt that and how it's impacted you. And also it's just a good reminder always of if you felt yourself maybe feeling like you need to do a certain thing or following what other people are doing, it's a good reminder, like you said, to bring that pendulum back to the centre. Refocus on who am I and how do I share my voice? Definitely a great reminder.
So thank you so much for joining me and for sharing your story and your wisdom with everybody. I'm going to leave all your links in the show notes and everything, but is there anything in particular you want people to go check out or anywhere you want to send people?
KELLY SPENCER: Thanks, Hollie. The Instagram and the website – they'll be linked here. That's where you can see everything that's happening. And yeah, I'm looking forward to a few murals coming up in the upcoming months once we get through this cold patch. And yeah, look out for those.
HOLLIE ARNETT: Cool. Yeah, everybody go check it out. And it's really fun to see what next collaboration you've been working on or things that come out. Definitely go follow Kelly. Thank you so much. Let's wrap it up and we'll see everybody in the next one.
KELLY SPENCER: Thanks, Hollie. This has been great.
