I first interviewed Morgan in 2016. She’s married to Danny and mother to Ruby. All three were featured on my previous writing website and republished here. Here’s my follow-up interview on how their family was impacted and what they’re up to now.
Morgan Allain of the Inkling Girl had some warning.
Conventions started closing earlier in rural Louisiana than the rest of the United States.
She’d started her business in 2012, soon after the birth of her daughter, Ruby. Morgan and her husband, Danny, met in college, connecting over their similar interests. They knew within weeks that they wanted to get married. In the twelve years they’ve been married, they both built their artistic careers online.
When Morgan was first featured on Sustaining Craft in 2016, she was creating wearable art and painting her Muse series. Since then, she held a solo exhibition and started new projects. Danny also had his own solo exhibition, he continues to work on his Bones series, and he started a comic book called Roll Initiative. His Kickstarter to print the first two issues was successfully funded. Access to the comic is available through his Patreon.
“We’ve both been steadily working making art,” Morgan said. “I still do a lot of portraits but I’ve sort of been doing a lot more animals and learning how to paint flora, flowers, plants, mushrooms, and stuff. We’re both still doing the same stuff, just in different, varying degrees.”
Morgan is no longer making wearable art, but she does offer accessories in the form of magnets, buttons, and pocket mirrors. “I did it for a long time, and I really enjoyed it but I phased all of that out, largely because, really when it comes down to it, although I’m artistic in a lot of ways, I’m really just not crafty,” Morgan explained. “I’m just not good at that stuff. I’m just not. And I know that. The kind of stuff that I made, it was sort of labor intensive, and all of the supplies were expensive and heavy, and honestly, they were kind of a pain in the butt to haul to places and set up. It took forever. I really wanted to focus on selling prints of my artwork, original artwork, and that kind of thing. I find more value in that.”
Morgan has branched out into working on several different series, with focus ranging from Greek mythology to folklore to mushrooms. “I’m not as hyperfocused like I was with my muses,” Morgan shared. “I was super, super focused on those for like two years. I just don’t have the same attention span as I used to. I just get bored more easily now. I kind of skip around to different things.”
She’s also teaching herself new methods. “It’s fun trying new papers and different brushes and stuff because I’ve been missing out on a lot,” Morgan said. “I’m kind of sad I didn’t discover this stuff sooner because it’s working on different mediums or different papers. I have to learn how to use the paint totally differently than on other stuff that I’ve worked on. It’s really interesting and keeps me from getting bored.”
The family lives in DeQuincy, La., 45 minutes away from where Morgan grew up in Lake Charles, one of the more well-known cities in Louisiana. “Where we live now is much more rural,” Mogan shared. “It’s the country. There are cows everywhere and not that many people, which is nice. Because of that, I feel like we were in a good position when this all started, just because we’re already used to being at home a lot of the time because we don’t live in a big city. We don’t go buzz around. I would go to the store fairly often and the post office pretty often, but I don’t like to go to the store all the time. We would do our best to have as much as we needed, aside from the essentials like milk, eggs, bread, that kind of thing. We are pretty good at having what we needed at home to last for a while.”
As the pandemic hit the United States, sporting events were canceled. Then conventions disappeared. “Really, about two weeks before everybody else’s stuff got shut down, ours already had,” Morgan explained. “We’d already done a big shopping trip and started really pushing our online sales, and letting people know, ‘Hey, our income’s gone. We’re gonna need help. Please share this.’”
They’d already had the lifestyle to shelter in place, with both Morgan and Danny working from home and homeschooling Ruby, now 8. But Ruby had to pause on extracurricular activities for the moment. “Cutting all of that out was hard for her because she’s only eight and she’s an only child so she’s kind of bored, but she understands,” Morgan said. “We’ve explained it.”
While losing the conventions meant a cut in income, the couple still sells online and offers perks like first looks, digital lockscreens, wallpapers, color sheets, and more through Patreon.
They also cut any expenses they could afford to spare. “I’m an anxious person by nature and I always have been,” Morgan said. “Danny .. I think I’ve just rubbed off on him because he’s a little bit more anxious now, more than he used to be. He’s also always been jokingly prepared for the zombie apocalypse. He’s a really good person in a crisis because he thinks of every eventuality. We saw our income drying up, so we were in the position of, we need to go buy food, and all the things we are going to need for at least a month because we don’t really know what we’re going to be earning. So we need to buy what we can while we have the money to do it. It wasn’t even really a strategy. It was, ‘We have to do this because we need to do it while we can.’”
They won’t run out of things to do any time soon between commissions and their Patreons. “We have plenty to keep ourselves busy, that’s for sure,” Morgan said. “We have a lot of content going out.”
Morgan recognizes that the world will be forever changed on the other side of the pandemic. “I think it’s going to be weird when everything gets back to normal because it’s going to be a new normal,” Morgan shared. “Not everything is going to be the same. I think it’s going to be a big adjustment. I really hope, that because we’ve had to slow down, and do things differently, I really hope that the people who have been figuring things out and solving problems continue to do that kind of work because a lot of people are figuring out that they work well in a crisis. A lot of people are finding out how adaptable they are and also I really hope that for everyone who is feeling kind of stuck at home, I hope that we have a new appreciation for our families and also with how we connect. I hope people can connect a little more meaningfully after this. And I think that will happen. We’ll see. But that’s what I’m hoping for.”
Season three of Sustaining Craft will explore how those with creative businesses have been impacted with the world-wide pandemic hitting the United States. Find Morgan on Instagram, Patreon, and Etsy to support her work.