“Since I was five years old, a little girl, I remember sitting around at home and my mother kept all these little drawings that I did on I always did, I always did them on little note cards. They would just always be little people. My mom had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said, I want to be a graphic designer and I want to work for a magazine in New York. I’ve always known that. In 2011, I bought a home and that’s when I decided to lay down my roots, and stay here and just throw everything I had into Wichita Falls, and the community itself.”
“I was always an artist, even when I was a little girl, I’ve always wanted to be an artist and draw and paint and do all those things. But once you become a graphic designer, you find that you don’t spend as much time doing the things you love doing and you’re spending more time in media. And so when I quit bartending and doing all that stuff, I needed stuff to fill my time. And so I thought I’m gonna get back into art. So I knew Inktober was coming up. So I went ahead and went out on a limb and started posting my stuff on my social media. It was awful. It was horrible. I mean, I was like, I look back at it now and it’s awful, you know, but I saw progress. And that was the whole point and that’s why I was posting it and because I was posting it, people started seeing my art, which has led to commissions and stuff like that. So if I had never posted it, I would never be able to look back and see what my actual progress was that day, or at the beginning of Inktober, which is in October, through the end of it. So it’s nice to be able to see that progress.”
“Once I realized that I was going to be here that all my friends were here, my family was here, and I knew so many people and I’m like do I really want to go somewhere else and start all over, and create the connections that I have somewhere else. But what really hit home for me was I was thinking about you know, I can’t have kids, I don’t have kids. I’m not married. I’m not worried about either one of those things but I thought well you know what am I gonna leave behind what’s my legacy going to be. And I was like you know I would have really a deep seated fear came over me, that I was going to die, and nobody would care that nobody’s going to come to my funeral. So everything I’ve done since I came up with that kind of epiphany was to make sure that I leave some sort of legacy behind. And I’m hoping I’m doing the right thing, going in the right direction, but that has been kind of like a driving motivator for me too, because of that fear.” – Katie Brit
Head over to Downtown Development’s Facebook Page to read more of Katie’s story.