How JLR engineer became full-time content creator and artist

An artist who gave up her engineering job to make online art videos and tutorials has said she has no regrets.

Temi Danso used to work for Jaguar Land Rover, but said she has always had an interest in art and took up colouring in during lockdown.

When her YouTube videos started to take off four years ago, she said she was making double her monthly salary as an engineer and was faced with a choice.

The 29-year-old from Warwickshire chose to put all her efforts into her online content and has now amassed almost eight million views on YouTube and almost four million on TikTok.

Ms Danso said: “I always drew at school, I did it all through GCSE and A-levels and I just kind of continued to do it in my spare time.”

But when she left school she found work as a mechanical engineer.

She said: “Being an engineer was a lot of fun, I Iove trying to figure out how things work and I loved working in the automotive industry.”

In 2011 she made her first YouTube art video and said it was “where my passion and my purpose was”.

By 2021, she said: “It got to the point where it felt like I had two full time jobs and at that point one had to give.”

After buying a house, she announced she was leaving engineering and thanked followers on her social channels for making the leap possible.

“I think I made the right decision,” she said.

Ms Danso’s work involves her using colouring pencils to create incredibly realistic pictures, and the videos include tutorials, rants about art and other content.

She has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, 300,000 followers on TikTok and 850,000 subscribers on YouTube, and has been invited to collaborate with companies such as Google, Meta, Adobe and YouTube.

She said her global fans included an 11-year-old girl from the USA who wrote her a letter telling her she had encouraged her to create.

Ms Danso said she wanted to give people the confidence to take up art and not be too self-critical.

She said not everything she tried worked, but “I always say come back the next day and you will have a completely different view of what you’ve created”.

One other element that sets Ms Danso apart from other artists is that she has a condition called Aphantasia.

It means her brain cannot form mental images, or as she puts it: “I have a blank mind’s eye”.

For instance, she explained that if most people closed their eyes and thought of an apple, they could picture that in their imagination.

“For me when I close my eyes, I see nothing,” she said.

This means her art work has to focus on images she can see in front of her.

She said: “If you told me to draw an owl, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

“I’m not great at Pictionary,” she joked.

Ms Danso said she had loved sharing her art journey with people and wanted it to continue.

“I’m honestly looking forward to the future, but I don’t have any plan or structure, because it could go in any direction,” she said.