Arnett Goes From the Studio to the Stable

When I first met Britny Arnett, I noticed a white pigeon hovering on her front lawn.

She told me it had appeared on the anniversary of her mother's death. Her family rescued it, but the pigeon never quite left, continuing to linger around their home.

It seemed fitting that a conversation about art would begin with an ordinary creature that had taken on an unexpected meaning.

Long before Arnett was creating illustrations, designing logos, or carving copper plates, she was drawing horses.

As a child, she couldn't have a horse of her own, so she created an imaginary stable.

“I would have my own stable of horses,” she said. “You draw a horse, and then you give it a name and all these different attributes.”

One of those horses was Greystone, a dapple-gray five-year-old stallion that stood 16 hands high and was a dressage horse… at least on paper.

Arnett drew more horses, gave each one a name and a set of characteristics, and eventually discovered other children doing the same thing. They traded drawings and horses and built their own imaginary worlds together.

“It was a little bit of an obsession,” she said. “But it also forced me to draw horses a lot. Like a lot, a lot.”

In many ways, horses were what got her started with art.

Today, Arnett works across illustration, graphic design, printmaking, writing, and teaching. Her Ulysses studio contains paintings, drawings, prints, children's books, graphic novels, and the tools of traditional printmaking alongside her digital work.

She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with concentrations in printmaking and graphic design. Her training included Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and the rest of the Adobe suite, while Procreate has become a favorite digital drawing program.

However, Arnett doesn't see digital and traditional art as opposing worlds.

“I love both,” she said. “Both have positives to them.”

Arnett’s approach to digital painting has changed over time. She used to work with numerous layers, carefully separating different parts of an image. Now, she often paints everything on one layer, partly as a way of getting around her own perfectionism. If everything is on one layer, she can't hide a mistake or go back to an earlier version. She has to figure out how to work with whatever happened.

“There are happy accidents that happen,” she said.

Arnett also has experience with relief printing, etching, and lithography. Relief printing involves carving a surface and rolling ink over it. Etching uses acid to eat lines into a prepared metal plate. Lithography relies on the different reactions of oil and water to create an image.

One of her lithographs took approximately 50 hours just to prepare the stone.

“You have to grind a stone to a perfect level of flatness,” she said. “It takes serious time. There’s a lot that can go wrong and will go wrong. It’s a medium where a lot of it is out of your hands, literally.”

Arnett also puts her artistic skills toward story-telling. One of her major projects now is a graphic novel about a unicorn learning how to heal her sick brother. The idea draws from Arnett's own childhood experience of having a brother who was ill.

“We all think of unicorns as these magical healing creatures,” she said. “But for me, I'm like, okay, how did the unicorns learn how to heal?”

The story explores the desire to help someone who is sick and the people who spend their lives trying to find answers.

“I kind of dedicate the story to all the doctors that don't give up,” she said, “all the researchers that just keep going and keep trying to find cures.”

Fantasy has long been part of Arnett's work. She grew up interested in medieval fantasy and Tolkien, and in 2018 published The Godpony, a novel she wrote and illustrated about a dwarf and a pony who dislike each other but are forced to work together.

Her interest in children's books has also grown alongside her own children.

She said one of the best parts of creating books for children is watching them respond to a story: bringing it back to be read again, laughing at something they recognize, or becoming attached to a character.

Her seven-year-old daughter has already started writing her own books and has a dedicated spot in her mother's studio. Her younger son has begun showing an interest in art as well.

Arnett also sees art not simply as a creative pursuit, but as a matter of figuring things out.

She once took a workplace skills assessment while working at a bank and was surprised to find that her strongest category was not creativity, but strategy.

“A lot of people do not realize how much strategy goes into making art,” she said.

Strategy becomes especially apparent when art is also a business.

Arnett takes on illustration, branding and publishing projects, including book illustrations, logos, and other commissioned work.

When it comes to networking, Arnett has found that some of her most valuable connections have come not from advertising herself online, but from simply meeting people.

“I found one of my biggest clients just by walking through the door,” she said.

In Southwest Kansas especially, knowing people can be as important as having a portfolio.

“You have to know the people,” she said. “You have to be integrated. People have to talk about you.”

At a recent Art in the Park event in Garden City, she paid $25 for a table and ultimately made about $850, while also meeting people who could become future clients.

“There are ways to do it,” she said. “You have to get out there.”

Arnett has also considered art licensing, in which artists license designs for products such as tea towels, wrapping paper, and other merchandise.

She brings her practical knowledge into her classes at The Main Artery, where she teaches drawing subjects including composition and layout, horses, cars and portraiture.

Even something as seemingly straightforward as a painting for a paint-and-sip event requires planning for the different ways people will approach the same picture.

“You have to take into account the perfectionism of some people, and then the freedom of some other people,” she said.

And then there is artificial intelligence.

“I hate AI art so much,” she said.

Arnett said she increasingly sees businesses using AI-generated graphics, something she finds discouraging as an illustrator. But she has also found that AI sometimes sends clients in the opposite direction.

Some clients come to her after trying to generate an image themselves, only to find that what the computer produces isn't actually what they had in mind.

“They tell me what they want, and what AI is giving them is not what they want,” she said.

From there, Arnett is able to take their ideas and turn them into something they can actually use.

Despite the technology and commercial work that now fill her days, Arnett still makes time to draw.

On Saturdays, she sometimes meets other local artists at the creek with a sketchbook. Sometimes she works traditionally; other times she switches to her iPad.

What began as an imaginary stable of horses for Arnett has become a way of giving others room to imagine, through the classes she teaches, the stories she writes, and the artwork she creates.