Feature Friday : Megan Jefferson, Indianapolis Artist

Tell us a little about yourself!

I attended Miami University and majored in art where I was lucky enough to explore a lot of different mediums. I’ve been a practicing artist ever since graduating. I typically create color based, semi abstract oil paintings. I also paint murals for private clients and businesses. Sometimes, I collaborate with my husband, who is also an artist and teaches ceramics at IUPUI (a university here in Indianapolis). We actually met in high school art class.

Full disclosure, I also work part time at Iris as part of the Customer Support team. I like having a variety of jobs, as I enjoy using both my left and right parts of my brain.

What type of art/media do you specialize in? What made you want to focus on these?

I’m an oil painter. I create watercolor paintings and I also paint murals. I really love the reward of seeing an outcome when creating. Painting is great for this immediate gratification. Process oriented work is less appealing to me. When painting, I can quickly add color or paint over areas, creating change quickly. I also love to see the outcome of large work. My very first job involved coordinating public art projects and several of those projects were murals. I saw the positive impact they had in communities and when I had the opportunity to create murals of my own, my interested in public art and neighborhood beautification was reignited.

How did you first get started in art?

I have always loved creating. When I was in high school, my family moved to a new town and that school had a variety of art classes that I loved. I planned to be a pre-med major in college but as I sat in orientation learning about all the science classes I’d be taking, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I told my mom I didn’t want to be there and that I wanted to be an art major instead. She was very supportive and said, “Let’s go find the art school!”

How has using Iris impacted your business?

I’ve been using Iris for 3.5 years. It’s helped me so much with administrative organization. I have worked in various administrative positions and actually like that detail-oriented work, but when it came to my own business, I found it hard to motivate to create and keep client lists, be consistent with newsletters and keep all my invoicing in one place. With Iris I have all my clients in one place, if I need to refer back to an email I sent or quote I sent out, it’s easy to find, I don’t have to scramble to look in several different places for information, it’s all kept in one spot, and because it’s cloud based, I can access that information anytime, anywhere.

My favorite feature is invoicing! Who doesn’t love getting paid? Because Iris integrates with Square, my clients can electronically pay quickly and easily. The invoices update automatically as paid and are kept both in the client’s profile and in a comprehensive list that I can export. This breaks out taxes, so it’s easy to know exactly how much I need to pay out in sales tax. And now that Iris offers payment schedules on invoices, I can create the payment schedule and not have to remember when to send those invoices out, Iris does it automatically. Love that.