Panna Stopped Posting for a Year – And Her Fantasy Art Started Selling to America

Who: Panna (PannaDraws)
What: Fantasy fine art illustrations and ceramic sculptures
Format: Physical product · Ireland, US, UK and EU – English
Started: 2019
Audience: 400 monthly shop visitors (peak)
Payers: ~3 orders a month on average (past year) – as low as 1 in quiet months, up to 5 in busy ones
Promotion budget: more than $100/month
Income: side income
Status: active and growing
Channels: search & AI traffic, text social media, your own newsletter

What worked: Organic Etsy search – now nearly all of her traffic and sales

The result: About 3 orders a month on average, no ad spend behind it

The catch: Two years of Facebook and Instagram ad spend brought followers, not customers

Panna has always drawn fantastical creatures – eagles, dragons, unicorns. She hated the still-life and figure drawing she was taught as a kid; she wanted action. As a teenager she moved into digital art, then set it aside for college and a career as a software engineer, now an engineering manager.

She moved to Ireland in 2017. With no social network there, she turned back to art, picking up watercolours in 2019. People kept asking why she didn't sell her work. So she introduced herself as an artist, opened a shop, and built a website – her tech background supplied both the funds and the skills to start selling online. She never wanted to sell in person; she's an active, outdoorsy person, and nature is her muse even though dragons and unicorns are her subject. “My art is the link,” as she puts it.

In 2025 she took up ceramics, meaning to keep it practical – pots, useful things. She ended up sculpting the same subjects as always: dragons, wildlife, horses, unicorns.

Panna started out focused on wildlife art – birds especially – assuming it had a bigger, more local audience in Ireland. Her first sales came through Irish bird-watching Facebook groups. Her first 100 customers arrived through organic Etsy search after she opened her shop, in the middle of the 2020 covid online-shopping boom.

Facebook and Instagram worked well from 2020 to 2022: engaging with wildlife-art buyers in birding groups grew her to almost 4,000 Instagram followers in about three years. She also spent on targeted Facebook and Instagram ads – that grew followers, but not sales.

She tried a newsletter too, because everyone told her email was the best form of marketing. She hated the chore of writing it (this was before AI tools existed to help) and gave up; the list is still active, but there's no regular send, and it never generated a direct sale.

Along the way she knew wildlife art would sell better, especially in Ireland – but she wanted to make fantasy art, and didn't want to turn her art into a second job chasing a bigger market. She bought two Etsy-focused online courses, found through Instagram ads. The first optimized her listings and genuinely kicked off her shop's growth; she's still partway through the second, a more thorough business course, and is now retroactively building the structure and planning she skipped when she first started selling.

Today she does very little social media. Almost all of her current audience and sales come from organic Etsy search and Etsy ads.

Facebook and Instagram ads brought followers – mostly other artists, not customers. She spent 100–150 EUR a month between 2020 and 2022 with zero conversions.

She wanted to quit many times, mostly over taxes: the accounting costs, the paperwork, how little she actually kept after expenses. About 80–85% of her customers are in the US, and new tariffs turned shipping into a genuine nightmare – even exempt original artwork now means brutal customs procedures, and courier companies wouldn't set her up with a business account for just 1–2 shipments a month, making duty-paid shipping options nearly impossible to find. Etsy pushing sellers to prioritize the US market didn't help. It was stressful enough that she often wondered if it was worth continuing.

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In 2023, Panna went through a breakup after a long-term relationship and, for the following year, mostly wanted to live her life. She cut her social media presence almost entirely – barely posting, releasing nothing new, not particularly caring how it looked. For reasons she still can't fully explain, that's when her fantasy art commission listing took off with American shoppers, where the audience for fantasy art turned out to be much bigger than in Ireland. Other printed pieces started selling more too. She hadn't done anything new beyond the SEO groundwork already in place – and right when she stopped focusing on the business, it turned. It was the first time she was in the green since starting.

It took Panna years to find her mission. She's been an outdoors kid her whole life – building castles for ants, catching fish, watching animals – which grew into a fascination with how mythology and folklore try to make sense of the physical world. “The fantastic surrounds us, it IS the world we live in,” she says.

Her audience splits two ways: people who already love folklore, fantasy, and the eerie mix of myth and reality in a Grimm brothers' tale – and people who don't yet know they're looking for that connection, who want to make sense of the world's wonder (and its ruthlessness), and maybe feel a little lost. She has an ideal-customer persona she calls Sorcha, but her real customers are usually RPG fans, D&D and video game players, and otherkin and furry folk – people who long for their characters to become real. She builds the link between this world and the fantastic.

Panna's plan is to keep being genuine now that she's found her mission, and get better at reaching people across both her 2D illustrations and her 3D ceramics. She's reviving the newsletter now that AI tools make the writing less of a chore, starting by reviewing all her product descriptions to get the messaging right first.

A new website is planned for the ceramics side, Panna Makes Creatures – a newer project aimed at a different kind of buyer, closer to collectors. Illustrations remain her main focus, since she hasn't fully built out even that sales pipeline yet; ceramics stays a “nice to have” for now. She doesn't see herself running her own webshop and driving traffic to it – her business isn't ready for that commitment yet.

Fantasy fine art illustrations and ceramic sculptures for those who can or wish to see beyond the everyday world and are ready to see what's there. I'll open the door.

Website: pannadraws
Instagram: pannamatena

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