Sarah Finnigan is a Houston-based artist creating portraits of allegorical landscapes. She infuses her work with fantastical elements to spark curiosity and the desire to explore, and to inspire a sense of reverence, awe and wonder.
Here we explore what inspires her work, and how her imagination for fantasy was born. To make your own art see the best drawing tablets, and these Procreate tutorials.
See more of her work on her website.
Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your art?
I grew up in Texas, right on the edge of the Piney Woods near the border to several other ecosystems, all of them flat and, in the grand scheme of earth’s variety of landscapes, boring. But we lived in an area undergoing a lot of development, which meant hundreds of acres of woods and old logging trails that were no longer on private property and could be thoroughly explored.
The flat, monotonous landscape meant the threshold of what would inspire my imagination was low. The slightest sloping toward a river was downright mountainous to me, and a tunnel through thick yaupon holly could be hiding anything beyond my view. The thick trees made everything feel uncharted and ripe for exploration.
Now as an adult, my parents live out in Colorado, and even from just visiting them I feel myself become more accustomed to what used to take my breath away. In a way, I think it actually benefited me artistically to keep those beautiful places at arm’s length.
What, outside of art, has most influenced your work?
There was a game series in the 90s; the first one was called Myst but I especially loved the sequel Riven. They placed you on abandoned islands and you had to puzzle out the narrative from what was left in the environment. They were all first-person, and while empty places in a game can just feel unpopulated if done wrong, these felt eerie and lonely, like liminal spaces.
I’ve always appreciated the stories a place told and how it made me feel, and those games distilled that in a way that still has an impact. The settings were vaguely fantasy, but could very much be real, and toeing that line of the otherworldly and mundane. I try to find that feeling in much of my work.
Is there a painting you saw in your formative years that changed everything? What was it?
Nope. Can I skip this question? I just don’t tend to look at singular pieces or artists for inspiration, and I never have done. No one painting has done that for me, but the closest I can think of is when I found the work of several contemporary western artists. The design in Brett Allen Johnson’s art, the composition and lighting in Logan Maxwell Hagege’s, and the colours in Eric Bowman’s all really blow me away.
What was your first ever paid commission, and does it stand as a representation of your talent?
My first real client work was for Magic: The Gathering. I loved it because they give the artists a large amount of art and information to draw upon, and the set I was working on was for a snowy Norse mythology-themed world. It had a distinct feel to it, and I leaned into representing what that world felt like as a whole in my first set of sketches, although I was only illustrating one location.
What’s the last piece you finished, and how do they differ?
I finished Chasing Smoke, and they’re almost too similar! My primary focus is on my personal work and keeping any client work I do in line with my body of work. Often I’ll come back to similar compositional solutions to evoke the same emotions. This one features two trees holding lanterns on either side of a path, underneath a solar eclipse.
Is making a living as an artist all you thought it would be?
In most ways, yes. I thought I’d love every minute of it, and I love most minutes. I enjoy the business stuff, I enjoy the days on end of just painting, I enjoy concepting new work. What I didn’t expect was to feel so torn between all of my different responsibilities.
I feel like I’m playing a never-ending game of Tapper, running between client work, personal work, events and family. Can’t let any of the root beers slide off the end of the bar! If I don’t regularly do personal work, then my client work suffers. Spend time on personal work and, oops, I neglected to get things ordered and ready for a big trip. Get back from events and time has ticked away on deadlines.
The solution is to cut it down and narrow in on what you enjoy most, and what’s working best, but that brings up the other thing I didn’t fully appreciate before going full-time on art. The survivors in this field are agile. The market shifts and suddenly what was working stops, and something you’ve neglected has become really important. You can have a lot of eggs in one basket, but you have to keep the other baskets stocked up too.
What advice would you give to your younger self to help them along on their journey?
To stop trying to make the art I thought would get me hired, that I thought other people wanted to see, and that made me feel like I was performing as a ‘fantasy artist’. I was painting a lot of people in armour and creatures because that’s “what you’re supposed to do”, but it wasn’t me.
It’s so important to make art that strikes an emotional chord in yourself.
Sarah Finnigan
Things clicked for me one day when I sketched a landscape that I really loved the idea of, how it made me feel, and then I spent two days trying to figure out how to shoehorn a person into the image without ruining it.
Initially I thought the figure ruined it because it was blocking things. But after a few days I realised their presence, no matter how small or in what capacity, made the environment be about them and their experience of it, and not about the viewer, whose perspective had been placed over stepping stones leading into the image. It’s so important to make art that strikes an emotional chord in yourself.
How has the art industry changed for the better since you’ve been working in it?
That’s the very definition of a loaded question! I think there’s a bright side to a lot of what’s been going on in the industry in the last few years. I love seeing traditional art in person, and AI has pushed many artists to take up the paintbrush or pencil again. I also think the homogenous aesthetic to AI-generated images is educating viewers and giving them a better eye, if much slower than it has for the rest of us. More clients are hiring a wider range of styles too, which is exciting to see.
What character or scene you’ve painted do you most identify with?
My painting Narrative is about how our beliefs and our perspective is shaped by the stories we tell and those we have handed down to us. It’s something I keep in mind often, and I was happy to be able to create a piece of art about it.
We still use constellations to relate stars to one another, seeing three-dimensional space flatly from our limited perspective without acknowledging that some are several times the distance of others, and then relating those grouped stars to mythological stories. It’s such a great example of how humans must use narrative to organise the world around us in order to make sense of it. So often we’re not even aware of distortions to our perspective, or to how others may see the same thing in a different way.
Is there a particular artist or franchise that would be a dream collaboration for you?
It would be fun to collaborate on a project with a friend where we each retain our own creative vision in the final product, but I don’t dream about contributing to franchises. It’s my opinion that in this industry, our own fandom for our subject matter is frequently used against us, and can result in artists being taken advantage of.
I’ve felt collaborative with art directors before, where I’ve been able to bring ideas to the table and contribute to the direction of the piece I’m working on, but I don’t confuse that with collaborating on a franchise. There are huge benefits to being very involved in the visual direction of a product that has a huge fanbase, but in the end the results are 100 per cent theirs, and there are costs to that to consider.
My personal work is important to me, and contributing too significantly to a single franchise could lead to my art being conflated with that IP, and no longer fully belonging to me.
What are the next steps in your artwork and life?
Hopefully there will be more exploration. When doing client work, you have an obligation to deliver consistency, and the first half of the year was all freelance. I want to push against what I’ve always done with my process and see where things go when I’m not forced to call something done before I’m ready to. I’m craving the excitement of finding a new way to do things. But the root beers keep sliding and I have to catch them, so who knows.
This content originally appeared in ImagineFX magazine, the world's leading digital art and fantasy art magazine. ImagineFX is on sale in the UK, Europe, United States, Canada, Australia and more. Limited numbers of ImagineFX print editions are available for delivery from our online store (the shipping costs are included in all prices).
