From breaststroke to brush stroke

PHOTOGRAPH: JOANNA AND LUDWIG @THATMEDIA

Pool to paint

swimming champion turned animal artist

Why a local girl who’d chased her Olympic dream her entire life, chose to leave the water and step foot in

the land of animals and art WORDS BY KERRY SMITH

Twenty-four-year-old swimming champion Danielle Tomlinson from Danes Hill in Leicester has become a renowned artist painting contemporary graffitistyle animal portraits. What started out as pen drawings is now a full-time business model. It’s afforded her to graduate from a home space to a quirky studio in Makers Yard, as well as the prospect of buying her first home after only two years in business.

While Danielle was an established swimmer competing and representing Britain internationally, even qualifying for Olympic and Commonwealth world trials, she’d slowly lost her hunger for competitive swimming.

Destined for the deep end, Danielle was swimming since the age of four and, with a love of science and sport, she naturally wanted to study sports science at Loughborough University. But in between lectures is where another passion grew. Animals and art are the two other great loves of the multi-talented Danielle, meaning she would often be found scribbling pet portraits using ball-point pens. When people began asking her to draw their dogs, she would sell her work at £40 a piece. It was actually her parents who encouraged her to pursue a career as an artist.

“My parents have been so supportive,” Danielle said. “They’ve never pushed me to do anything, so I’ve always had the freedom to try new things. My dad built me a garden studio in lockdown and my family encouraged me to set up the business. They’ve always told me to do what makes me happy.”

Quitting swimming and diving into business must have been daunting: “I’d just fallen out of love with swimming and my love of exotic animals and art took over. Stereotypically, people might not make money as an artist, but I quickly had to start turning work away.”

Now - with over 13k Instagram followers, clients around the world, and being on the market for a house - the exotic animal and pet painter has been approached by eight galleries. But, she’s declined their offers, deciding to represent herself instead.

On gaining the confidence to become a business owner and how to market herself as an artist, she said: “I did a marketing course and then things started to pick up and I was able to make it my full-time job. But it did become really stressful, and I felt like I had to take on all the work that was coming in. I learnt that I could say no and that I will sometimes have to turn work away. Putting a price on my work to begin with was challenging.”

At the start of the pandemic, work that Danielle would sell for £800, now sells in the region of £1500+. But making money as an artist is an idea that some people still struggle to understand.

“People still ask me what my real job is when I tell them I’m an artist,” Danielle said. She often has people ask her to paint their pets declaring that they’ll ‘pay her for it’ as though painting is her hobby. When people think of artists they think of Michelangelo or Van Gogh, they don’t expect that the girl next door is able to buy a house from her artworks.

Find Danielle’s work on Instagram @danielletomlinsonart or at danielletomlinsonart.com.

MY FAMILY HAS ALWAYS TOLD ME TO DO WHAT MAKES ME HAPPY