About

I’m one of those people who have been creating all of their lives. In childhood I preferred painting and drawing to playing tag outside on a sunny day. After a rainfall I would be in the mud making cups and bowls, then leave them to bake in the coming sun. So it was natural I studied art in college. My focus was on clay - hand building, not throwing.

At the end of my senior year in college I took a Broadcast Television class, taught by a local reporter. I learned about a new medium (then!) - video tape. I wanted to learn more but there weren’t any courses offered and the entry cost to the equipment was prohibitive. So upon graduation I applied to my local tv stations to become a news cameraman and landed a weekend job as a teleprompter, which got my little toe in the back door. I picked up the skill set of visual storytelling by hanging out with the cameramen and editors and within a year was shooting and editing my own stories for the news. This path took me to San Francisco, via Portland, where I spent a good part of my career as a video journalist.

During my broadcast journalism career, I also received my Masters from JFK University in Arts and Consciousness.  

Times change and a freakish work injury helped propel me into a whole new avenue of exploration via the internet. Along with my husband, we formed a company and gradually began producing our own stories that we distributed on the internet. The show and blog we started in 2006, Cooking Up a Story, was one of the earliest internet-based television shows on food and sustainability and it allowed me to expand my creativity exponentially in a subject matter that I adore.

In the fall of 2015 I had a life-changing event occur that caused me to reevaluate my current direction. 

Looking back upon my whole career, I am very proud of the pioneering work I did on television - especially opening those early doors for women to enter the field normally associated for men - and also laying the groundwork for later in creating an online television show. But the one thing I felt I hadn’t done was get back to my art. I kept thinking, I’ll do it later. I finally decided, that later is now. Since that Fall, I’ve been drawing, painting, and creating every single day. As an illustrator, you could say I am a late bloomer, but creating has always been at the core of what I do and who I am. Taking the beauty of everyday life and turning it into something that evokes joy. That’s what I really love to do. I look forward to my next encore career as an illustrator and visual design artist.

If you’re interested in licensing, collaborating, or commissioning work, please reach me: rebecca [@] potter-productions.com