Izzie Brown’s foray into the business world began with an assignment from her eighth-grade art teacher at Rushe Middle School.
The teacher asked her to create a portrait of the Jamaican singer Bob Marley, which Brown did — using the titles of Marley’s songs to form his image.
(B.C. Manion/Staff Photo)
The teacher liked the work so much she asked if she could keep it.
Brown posted an image of the work on Facebook and people told her that’s something they would buy. And her uncle was so impressed, he encouraged her to launch her own business.
So, she did.
She calls it Word Tangles. She sells portraits and T-shirts on Etsy — an online retail outlet for artists — as well as on a Facebook page and at local markets.
Besides her Marley portrait, she’s created likenesses of Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein.
The Jackson and Presley images are crafted from song titles. The Monroe portrait is made up of song and movie titles, and her Einstein uses the first 222 digits of pi.
She created Einstein’s image to celebrate Pi Day, which was March 14.
“My Algebra II teacher wanted us all to do a little project for Pi Day. The first thing that came to my mind was to do Albert Einstein,” she said.
The 14-year-old also does custom work. She did a commissioned portrait of the musical artist Sting, and is working on a large-scale surrealistic work called “Consummation” that her uncle hired her to do.
She also used her artistic skills to “zentangle” an entire wall in the upstairs bathroom in her Land O’ Lakes home. Zentangle is an art form that involves drawing structured patterns.
She’s young, but she has savvy business instincts.
“I really have to play to my audience,” Brown said. “At first, it was just doing what I wanted to do. But now, it’s kind of like I have to listen to what people want me to do. On my Facebook page, I’ll ask my viewers, ‘Hey, what color should I do for the background for this one?’”
She sells merchandise at kids’ markets affiliated with Tampa Fresh Markets.
“They go around to Carrollwood, Wiregrass, Hyde Park, Seminole Heights,” she said. “It’s free if you’re under 17.”
Brown also uses the events to get a pulse on what people would like her to produce.
“People will go by and they’ll say, ‘Oh, my gosh, do you have Jim Morrison?’”
She doesn’t. But she plans to do his portrait in coming months. Brown also expects to create images of Jimi Hendrix, and possibly Audrey Hepburn.
There are limits on what she will produce, however. She needs to feel a degree of respect for the subject of her portraits, she said, to get into the right creative mindset.
“Over the summer, I’m going to do the Beatles, all four of them,” Brown said. “I am going to have them on square canvases. I’m going to do all of their faces out of Beatles songs. I’m going to put all four of the Beatles together, and I’ll have them on a shirt.”
When she’s ordering T-shirts that display her portraits, she considers marketing issues.
“When I did Marilyn, I thought I should get some feminine-fit shirts because all I had done was unisex,” Brown said. “I was just thinking about my audience.”
When her Michael Jackson T-shirts weren’t selling that well, she decided to get some smaller, feminine-fit T-shirts, and after that, her sales picked up.
She sells her canvas works for $125 each, and her T-shirts for $12 for solid colors and $15 for the Bob Marley, featuring the Rastafarian colors of green, yellow and red.
Brown also is selling a T-shirt she designed to benefit autism research. She plans to donate 20 percent of the profits from those sales to the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the University of South Florida.
She’s also planning to do a T-shirt with a breast cancer ribbon in October, sharing a portion of those proceeds as well.
Brown, who attends the International Baccalaureate program at Land O’ Lakes High School, has ambitions to attend business school at Harvard University.
She’s not entirely sure where her career path will lead, but she enjoys being in a leadership role. Ultimately, her primary goal is to accomplish something of significance, she said.
“I just want to be remembered for doing something great,” Brown said. “I want to have that kind of credential.”
To find out more about Brown’s work, check out her Etsy shop listing at Etsy.com/shop/wordtangles. Or her Facebook business page at Facebook.com/ wordtangles.
Published June 11, 2014
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