Since I started streaming my paintings on Twitch a little over a month ago, I’ve been so pleasantly surprised to find such a supportive community of both art lovers and fellow artists. I’m on there four days a week — Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays — from roughly 2 p.m. EST to about 6 or 7 p.m. Every session, I walk through my painting process for my realistic still life and trompe l’oeil paintings in real time, and I chat with friendly artists, creatives and general art fans throughout. I’m a fairly introverted person, but I’ve found that being on Twitch has really helped me to articulate more about what I paint and why, and that has just started to find an audience, many of whom have expressed that watching me paint my realistic acrylic pieces is like magic. It’s such a kind comment, but I also think that it makes the idea of making “good” art seem inaccessible. Today, I’m going to attempt to encourage those who think they’ll never be “that good” to know that persistence pays off. I’m going to show a variety of pieces from various stages of my life and art-making in order to demonstrate that improving one’s art skills is something that is very possible for anyone who wants to do so.
The Younger Years
When I was young, I wanted to be a few things when I grew up. I thought of being an animator, I thought of working at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, I thought of working as a matte painter (the people who painted large backdrops for film in mostly traditional media; now, it’s done digitally). I had a lot of imagination, and I tended to emulate the things that I loved in the drawings and paintings that I made. In the end, I decided to simply pursue an education in fine art, so I could make my own work.
The College Years
In college, I studied art. I went to a few different colleges, ultimately moving to Florida after my husband and I got married and finishing out my degree in art with a concentration in drawing at the University of Central Florida. While there is good and bad to any type of art education, I suppose, I ultimately think that a lot of what I learned there pushed me into a direction and artistic persona that I was uncomfortable with. It became kind of defeating. Looking back to that time, over 25 years ago, I guess I thought that somehow just taking classes in drawing, painting and art history would somehow enable me to make the type of art I wanted to make. Instead, I always felt like I was coming up short. I couldn’t make the art that I was “supposed” to make; I wasn’t skilled enough to make the type of art I “wanted” to me. Although I held a couple of art jobs after graduation (I was a caricature and silhouette artist at Walt Disney World), I soon stopped making art. I still had a desire to be creative, so I took extra post-graduate classes in Interior Architecture and Art Business. But life took over, my art faded away, and I didn’t do make any real paintings or drawings for over a decade.
The Magazine Years
I had a few careers in the post-college years, including working in real estate for a subdivision developer and a year as the editor of a small newspaper in the very unique town of Celebration, Florida. I was really proud that I had at the very least started to accumulate some writing experience. Maybe that could get me in the door into something creative?
I started googling and soon found a small art publication called Art Calendar just 30 minutes from where I lived. I read up on it. It was a magazine that aimed to help working artists learn to earn a living. I got bold and brave, and I sent them an unsolicited job application, telling them that I’d like to work for them. Surprisingly, they wrote me back and invited me for a job interview. Turns out they’d been looking for an assistant editor. I got the job, which at least got me working in the arts, even if I couldn’t make it myself.
Every month, I’d edit articles, research topics that I thought would be of interest to working artists and seek out artists that I thought made amazing work and who were willing to share how they accomplished what they accomplished. The magazine grew, and eventually the existing editor left, and I was promoted. Soon after, we changed the name of the magazine to Professional Artist. I worked very hard there, and I took my job very seriously. I truly believed that my staff, my freelance writers and I were making a difference, helping other artists figure out some of the things that they struggled with, personally and professionally. Despite my occasional grammatical mistakes or typos, I was good at my job. But I still wanted to paint, and the more art I looked at, the more I wanted to do it.
I decided life was too short not to try, so I made a plan. Every day, I began waking up early and painting before work. I painted late into the evening afterward and often on my weekends. I started researching articles, watching YouTube videos and building a library of real physical books on painting. I started in oils (now I only paint in acrylics, though). I practiced and practiced and practiced, and eventually, after about six months, I opted to leave the magazine and give it a go. That was risky. Very risky. I don’t advise it, but it was what I did.
I entered my first local competition with one of the paintings I had started during that transition time. I won second place and $800, I think. That was my beginning as a professional painter.
A Lot of Evolution
In the 14 years since that time, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. In the early years, I even briefly returned to a traditional job and nearly gave up. But I kept persisting. I’ve changed what I paint, I’ve changed my medium, I’ve changed how I view my art and its purpose. I’ve changed a lot, and I still keep learning and building my skills and my vision because I’ve concluded that what I paint is important and that my very unique painting process (layering multiple glazed layers of translucent acrylics) is beautiful. I dedicate many hours to making extraordinary pieces of art, and you would be hard-pressed to find another artist who works as hard as I do.
My art life is different for me today than when I started. I have a mission: I make happy art. I have a focus: I paint food-related works, although that has also evolved in the last year or so with the addition of my foodscape pieces. I’m excited to see what I can do and how far I can push my painting, and I hope that sharing my story might inspire others to keep pushing to make their own art, too.
Sharing My Art Evolution on Twitch
Ultimately, I hope you’ll have a chance to join me today at 2 p.m. when I do the Twitch reveals of some of the art I’ve made throughout these years, including some of those shown here. If you can’t, my husband has started putting replays of some of my Twitch streams on YouTube, so you can catch them there, just a bit later than they originally air on Twitch.
I often say on my streams that I want to live in a world full of artists. What I mean by that is that I hope that everyone everywhere can someday feel empowered to make the things that they want to make. We have artists, crafters, writers, musicians, comic book artists and composers spending time in my Twitch streams. It’s like opening up my metaphorical studio door and inviting everyone to make things together or just enjoy watching and hearing the painting process. It’s a little peaceful escape from the real world, from a little girl who grew up in a small town, daydreaming that she’d be an artist.
And if nothing else, when I finish my current ice cream painting (of a butter pecan ice cream cone), we’re going to have an ice cream party on Twitch (Bring Your Own Ice Cream, of course), probably next week some time. Fun, right?
I hope to see you on Twitch soon!
Kim T.
- Showing 40-Plus Years of My Art on Twitch Today: Proof that Artists Can Progress… – July 24, 2026
- We’re Going to Paint a Tiny Ice Cream Bar on Twitch Today – June 15, 2026
- We’re a Go for Twitch Painting Livestreams – June 12, 2026
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