Rising Stars: Meet Rebecca Tillman-Young

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rebecca Tillman-Young.

Hi Rebecca, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. 
I’m an artist, a teacher, and a dabbler in many things. I’m best known as a portrait/figurative painter and as the co-founder of the RTY Art Academy with my husband, Luke, where I teach people to draw and paint portraits. I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist, even before I really understood what that meant. I’ve always loved making things, drawing, painting, etc. 

When I got to college, I went the impractical route and got my degree in painting, and then spent some years wondering why I did that because it’s really tough to make a living off a painting degree. 

I don’t think I really understood what it was to be an artist for a long time, even after graduation. In fact, in a lot of ways, I came out of that program more confused and insecure than I went in. 

Around that time, I met and married Luke, and in 2014, we moved from Texas to Los Angeles after coming out here on a road trip. We fell in love with the city. We found our first apartment on that vacation and basically just went back for our stuff. 

At that time, I was mostly doing freelance design work and collaborating with Luke on some of the projects he was doing. I was struggling to find my feet in my art and wasn’t painting as much as I wanted to be. I had work in a few shows, took lots of workshops and classes, and continued pursuing it, but it was a slow and often frustrating road. 

But one thing I’ve always been good at is the technical aspect of painting and explaining things in a way that people can understand. So, in 2017, Luke and I decided to lean into those skills and started creating lessons and content teaching drawing and painting skills. 

Luke came up through the tech and internet marketing world, so his skillset was really invaluable. We’ve always worked well together, so it just made sense to combine forces. 

In 2020, I came out with a course called Lifelike Portraits in 21 Days, teaching portrait drawing through a step-by-step process and focusing on encouraging people to lean into their creative side. We were also just in time to capture a lot of momentum when suddenly everyone was quarantining and looking for new activities to pass the time. 

A major theme of the business and of my personal ethos started to evolve around the idea that art is for everyone, and we need to reframe this idea of “talent” and recognize that these things are all learnable skills. That art is not just for the “talented” few. It’s healthy for us to learn new things, and that making art has so many benefits across all aspects of our lives. 

Since then, I’ve launched a few different courses in different media, like digital painting in Procreate and, my favorite, oil painting. My flagship program now is the RTY Art Oil Portraits Academy, which is a 6-month program where students go through a focused, progressive course with interactive support from me and other instructors and artists to help them develop their skills. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There have been plenty of ups and downs on the way here, and there continue to be many ups and downs as we navigate the challenges of running a small business as well as making meaningful art. 

RTY Art was by no means our first try at the online business world. We literally have a wall of framed logos in our home, showcasing the many, many “failures” that got us here. Each one taught us something valuable, even though ultimately it didn’t work, and we moved on to try something else. 

When we started RTY Art, we were in a pretty rough spot. We had lost our main client and had almost no income. We were falling deeper and deeper into debt, living in an apartment we could no longer afford, and literally eating beans and cornbread for dinner because it could fill us up for under $5 a meal. 

RTY Art was, in a way, a bit of a Hail Mary at the time. I was 27 years old and terrified. I remember the first ads we filmed and how many tears and arguments went into getting them made. I had so many insecurities around my abilities, my worthiness, etc. 

Honestly, I still fight those battles today, but I’ve definitely come a long way from those first videos where I looked near-tears for having to stand in front of a camera and ask people to listen to me or buy my stuff. 

I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the spotlight, and doing what we do has pushed me up against that struggle in a lot of ways. I’ve also had to learn about marketing, sales, and the psychology of getting people to take action, both in the sales process and in the learning process. I don’t consider myself a natural salesperson, and that’s been a real struggle for me. 

Through that struggle, though, I’ve learned some very important things. For example, sales is interesting because it’s not just about the first step. In essence, even after someone signs up for my program, my job is to continue to sell them on the process and their own abilities at every stage of their journey. 

It’s not enough for me just to sell a course. I want my students to actually complete it and see results. That means creating a program that breaks things down into manageable steps and creates an easy path for progression. It also means providing the support for working on the mental and emotional blocks that keep people from continuing when they face a challenge or struggle. 

Through teaching all this, I’ve also found a lot of freedom and opportunity for growth and development in myself and my work, which has been an amazing side effect. 

An important lesson for me came through seeing how every single student I teach struggles with many of the same insecurities and fears that I (and probably most other) artists seem to struggle with. Things like perfectionism, fear of making mistakes, and limiting beliefs about yourself and your abilities. 

Helping students overcome these things has made me shift my perspective on myself, too, which has been really impactful on me as a person and as an artist. I’m very grateful to all my students for the ways they push me to continue to learn and grow. 

Today, I aim to give myself as much freedom in my creativity as possible and lean into experiments even when they may not succeed. Luke and I always have a handful of fun projects on the back burner — we wrote a middle-grade novel a few years ago, I started making these tiny clay monster creatures and sets for them to do little skits; we’re working on an idea for a board game; I’m teaching myself piano… 

And Luke has recently started painting, too, which has been incredible and, honestly, inspiring. I’ve loved watching him get into it and navigate making art. He’s such a creative thinker, and he doesn’t suffer from the same hangups as I do, which has really pushed a lot of self-reflection for me. There’s never a dull moment. I look forward to whatever comes next for us. 

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar with what you do, what can you tell them about what you do?
As an artist, I specialize in portraits and figures in oils. My work is somewhere on the realism/surrealism spectrum, often incorporating floral elements and dreamy, colorful compositions. I’ve recently begun working on a series of self-portraits that are essentially about my relationship with myself and my emotional experiences, but haven’t shared many of those yet, so stay tuned! 

As a teacher, I specialize in creating programs that guide people through an easy-to-follow process of learning that builds skills quickly while sneaking in a major focus on the real, deeper struggles of learning and creativity: overcoming the fear of failure (I encourage students to remember that it’s only failure if you quit before succeeding!), making lots of mistakes (because you learn more from mistakes than successes most of the time), and of course, practice, practice, practice! 

I think I’m most proud of my students and all they have accomplished. It’s incredible getting to watch someone go from 0 experience in an objectively challenging skillset to taking commissions, showing their work, etc. But even more incredible is seeing how their sense of self and their confidence skyrockets through that transformation. It’s amazing, humbling, and inspiring. 

What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
It’s hard to identify one thing, but I think it’s something to do with being willing to self-evaluate and to endure the discomfort (and sometimes a bit of kicking and screaming) that comes from moving outside your comfort zone. 

It’s a double-sided coin, to be sure. You can get trapped in a negative spiral of identifying all the “negative” things about yourself and cataloging the WHY of each one. Personally, I find that I’m very willing to accept that the problem is me, which, on its own, can be a bit depressing and discouraging. 

But if you’re willing to really examine yourself and do the work of healing and accepting all the things that have made you who and what you are, you open the possibility for growth beyond what you thought you were capable of. 

The most important lesson in this for me has actually been that I don’t need to change who I am, just to accept and lean in. You have to be willing to really know yourself, which is much more difficult than it sounds. 

This is a continuous process, too. At every stage of growth in either myself, my art, or my business, I encounter new struggles — or often just the same struggles dressed up differently. Each time, I have to evaluate. Where does this come from? What is it telling me? 

It’s hard to know what you really want, so you have to check in often and ask: What do I want? Where am I going? Does what I’m doing still align with what I know of myself and what I want? Can I come up with a better solution? 

It also helps a lot to have a partner who is willing to do that work with you and push you forward. RTY Art would not exist without Luke. I, as an artist and a person, would be in a very different place without him. I continue to learn so much from his compassion, strength, and determination. I’m incredibly grateful for him. 

This has been a challenging journey, and I know it’s nowhere near over. The things I’ve learned to get me here have only shown me how much more there is to learn and grow. Every day, I get to see how big an impact it can have on someone to realize that they can do something they thought they couldn’t. How learning a new skill can open the mind and allow you to see the world in completely new ways. It excites me and makes me want to try lots of new things, too! 

There’s a whole world of interesting things out there to learn, and if I truly believe my own message of “skill, not talent,” I must also believe that it will only improve my life to learn as many of them as I can in the brief time allotted to me in this life. 

Contact Info:

• Website: rebeccatillmanyoung.com
• Instagram: @rebeccatillmanyoung
• Facebook: /RTillmanYoung
• Other: https://rtyart.com