Marjorie Liwag of LittleMsPrinter talks about her start in calligraphy as a career, her challenges, and her advice to aspiring future artists.

If you ask her if she ever saw herself having a full-time career as a calligraphy artist, Marjorie Liwag, or Marj for short, will just laugh at you. “Before I became a full-time calligraphy artist, I was a Senior Market Analyst in a FinTech company!” Marj exclaims. “I definitely did not see myself as someone who would be an artist.”

But Marj is definitely not complaining. At 30 years old, she has been working at LittleMsPrinter since May 2015 and already has hundreds of clients under her belt. “Please don’t make me count my clients!” Marj pleads. “Let’s just say in the years I have been in business, I have been making a good living.”

Marj got into calligraphy back when she had difficulty coping at her corporate job. “I needed to give my mind a break, so I bought a marker. It turned out to be a chisel-type pen used for calligraphy. I just started drawing on paper and made some thick and thin lines. Testing out the pen, basically,” she shrugs. She found it very therapeutic.

And when she shared her work on Instagram, she was met with plenty of positive responses. “A lot of people commented that I was really good at calligraphy!”

The Start of Calligraphy… and LittleMsPrinter

A sample of Marj’s work

And because Marj got the attention of her friends and some netizens, she started to get opportunities to improve her art as a calligrapher. She got hired to do nameplates, art using chalk, and even make a whole mural. Marj enjoyed it so much that it got to the point that she took a leap of faith. “I quit that particular job!” she exclaims, laughing. “I had no idea how to turn it into a career, to be quite honest. I just saw it as a way to escape from the daily corporate grind of my life.”

Marj got the name LittleMsPrinter ironically from a malfunctioning printer. “So there was an event,” Marj relates, “and the original plan was for the signs for that event to be all printed. For some reason, the printer didn’t want to work. I was asked to write all the labels and signs manually!” Everyone started calling her Little Miss Printer during that time, and the name stuck, so she decided to use it as her business name.

Even though she had plenty of traction to start, she faced plenty of challenges. One was that she was not a business person. “I had no idea how to price commissions! Also, it was hard to sell the value of my work to people,” Marj recalls. To put it mildly, she also had to deal with some not-so-nice clients. “I worked so hard on that project, only for her to pay me nothing. It was one of those things that made me doubt myself,” she admits.

Thankfully, Marj stuck with it. And she also got plenty of better clients who respected her time and creativity, like Rica Peralejo Bonifacio (“My first client ever!” Marj says) and Star360 Paper Corporation, the company of Sharpie, Limelight, and Mongol Pencil.

Challenges To Her Business

Her work for Macao Imperial Tea

Marj describes her art style as free-flowing. “Whatever flows out of my creativity, that’s what I do!” she exclaims. “I don’t really have a fixed style. And I guess that makes my clients happy because I am very flexible and can meet their needs.” She also loves the creation process but is her own worst critic. “What I hate the most is when I repeat my work from the beginning because I feel like something is off, and I want to change something.”

LittleMsPrinter’s Art Style

An example of Marj’s free-flowing style

For Marj, the most important thing about LittleMsPrinter is that it feels like it’s her life’s redemption story. “In starting and staying with this business,” she says, “I feel like my passion for life was resurrected. And I know that it only happened because of God.”

Her Personal Redemption

Even amid the uncertainty right now, no thanks to the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s just happy she’s able to celebrate many years (and still counting) of being LittleMsPrinter. “I know it was no one but Him who brought me to where I am now, and I am eternally thankful for that. Because I plan on doing this pretty much forever.”

Interested to have commissioned work from Marj? Check out LittleMsPrinter’s Facebook or Instagram, and send her a message!

LittleMsPrinter Will Be Printing Forever

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