“People don’t just want the result; they want the experience of the work coming to life.” Sheean Hanlan

In this episode of 15 with Fosca, I’m joined by Sheean Hanlan, a live event illustrator based in Florence whose work captures people not as perfect replicas, but as their essence, gestures, moods, microexpressions, and spirit.

We talk about how Sheean first encountered Florence as a Pepperdine study abroad student, and how she felt, almost immediately, that something in her was going to shift. At the time she was pre-med, but the city’s art, history, and beauty cracked something open. She returned again and again until 2020 when she took the leap that changed everything.

Sheean shares the behind-the-scenes truth: getting to Italy during COVID, training intensively in classical techniques, and then realizing that mastery doesn’t automatically equal a life. There was a gap between learning and making a career until she began trusting what felt natural; a style that embraces the human hand, the beauty of imperfection, and the thrill of watching art come alive in real time.

We also talk about deeper questions like what it means to create while surrounded by Renaissance greatness, how a Henry James story (“The Madonna of the Future”) shaped her thinking about originality, and why the rise of AI has only increased the hunger for real artists and real presence.

Sheean Hanlan Biography and Links

Sheean is a live event illustrator splitting her time between Italy and the Bahamas. She creates watercolor portraits at luxury weddings across Europe, and her work has been featured in British Vogue and commissioned by Amazon and the National Gallery of London.

https://linktr.ee/Studiosheean

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Podcast Producer: Andrew Niklas Curtis

Production Intern: Nicole Stevens

Recorded via Zoom, post-production Lorenzo Maiani, Faminore Sound Agency