When you’re thinking about being productive and/or successful as an artist, it really helps to look at the big picture. I tend to worry about not getting enough done from week to week, probably because I know I’m going to come onto this blog and confess every Friday.

But that weekly cut-off time frame doesn’t matter, really; it’s an arbitrary limitation that I’ve imposed on myself to help myself. It spurs me on, even though absolutely nothing will happen if I don’t make any art or if I don’t post about it. *crickets*

This week I’ve attacked the work. It’s been hard to make myself stop long enough to write about it, actually! And all this after moping last week about not getting enough done – the thing that worked was turning up, doing a few materials tests, and letting the little embers catch fire.

I made a mistake…

Last year I knew I couldn’t go straight through the process and print my notes, because I had to have surgery. So I did the next best thing and got all my prep out of the way – I mixed up all three of the colours I would need, and tested them out. Great, right?

Well, when I did that, I ended up re-mixing the lightest colour, as colour no. 3 was too close to colour no. 2. That means I ended up with four bottles of ink.

Of course, three months on, I picked up the rejected colour and started a full run of prints, and only realised what I’d done after getting through most of the first side!

That meant I had to totally reformulate the two colours that came next, which was a waste of time. But… after having spent time this week listening to a podcast episode about sunk costs, I was happy to brush that off and work on making my second round of colours better than the first. After all, I knew the first iteration wasn’t amazing, so this was a chance to shoot for that!

More about sunk costs…

I found this to be such a motivating concept, and one that I think needs to be broadcast to artists as well as economists. It gave me the kick to clear out the corners of my studio that had become a shrine to the 5+ year old class notes and projects that I didn’t really want, but had once put a lot of time into. Into the bin, and I feel fine.

So I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that, eventually.

But for now, I’ve got money to print.

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Overwhelm has hit me hard.

I really, truly hate to say that, as I think it’s so commonplace and it’s something that I’ve gone through and defeated before, and I can already see its cyclical pattern laid out before me: it comes and goes, and I get that it’s absolutely pointless to fret over it.

Backing up – the return of a shelved project

So why slip back into feeling swamped? Well, I was listening to a podcast whilst tidying up, as I often do, and this one happened to be about increasing creative productivity. I wasn’t going out in search of self-flagellation, I promise – I just cycle through different podcasts for creatives and for marketing, and this one popped up.

It was great, actually – engaging and thought-provoking, and it pushed me into reconsidering my timeline for the course I’m writing. I should say, into reconsidering the fact that if I don’t start writing this course as a priority it won’t be finished this year.

Fast forward through the buzz of that evening to the grim reality that the course is not a simple project at all… cue feeling swamped and overwhelmed.

Writing the course I want to take

I’ve been through plenty of art education, and I can see a lot of low-quality courses bandied around online.

There are even more blog articles telling you that you can easily create a course and earn passive income from it. This is the problem – a lot of low, or at best, mid-quality content encouraging you to create low or mid-quality content as a course. Actually, the same goes for ebooks. I think that if you want to write and publish a book in a week, as I’ve seen suggested online, you should accept that you’ll be writing and publishing a bad book at best, or more accurately, an assortment of related articles.

This really isn’t something I’m happy to do, but I’m not happy to sit on my idea for much longer either. I feel as though I need to make this a priority just so that I can get it off of my shoulders and carry on with the artwork that I had to shelve at the end of last year.

What I want to do is to write the course I would want to take, and to write the book I would want to read. Sounds good, but both of those things have to be, for me, substantial and specific, high-quality offerings. The kind of things that require time and research, and a lot of focus.

What I’ve done to get unstuck

Nothing gets done via hand-wringing and worrying.

One of my first jobs this week was to start cleaning and organising my studio, as it had been neglected since my enforced break at the end of last year. This will help with absolutely everything – being able to quickly do some work in some stolen time or find the resources I need for a job.

Another was to organise my existing course/book notes, see what I already had and what else I needed, and come up with a writing plan.

So far, the plan is to flesh out the existing headings into chapters and write the entire text as I would write a book. When the first draft is done, I’ll see if I can package it as a course by recording it. After that, I’ll add to the text, then refine and edit it into a full book. If it’s a bad book, then I’ll make it better. Simple plan.

What helps me to stop freaking out is that part of the plan is only looking at the steps that are right in front of me. Writing a book is a big deal; writing ten thousand words is less so, but writing one thousand words about one single topic is not as terrifying.

Also, I learned that I really like writing notes longhand instead of typing them.

Doing the work

It never ceases to surprise me, just how easy it is to actually get on with the work. Sound strange? Well, I find that thinking about doing something is invariably more stressful than the task itself actually turns out to be once I get started. I managed to start testing my Solarfast inks with the screen printing thickener and come to the conclusion that this was absolutely not the right medium for the money project.

The great thing about this is that even though my tests didn’t turn out as I wanted, the way forward with the inks I mixed and tested in December is totally clear and I’m not left with any niggling doubt as to whether I should try something different.

I’m going to keep the same train of thought for the writing. Just sit down and do the work, even if it’s just a tiny bit, or just to answer that small nagging question. It’s rarely as hard as you imagine it to be.

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It’s been a busy creative week, but most of my creativity has gone into writing, which, when I sit down to write about what I’ve done, makes me feel awkward about not hitting the goals I had in mind.

On the other hand, looking back at where my time has gone made me realise just how much has actually been done.

Feeling slightly dissatisfied?

This week I’ve been less artist than writer, businesswoman and agony aunt.

In the last week, I’ve worked on eight articles and published six of them, with the other two due to go live in a few days. In some cases, creating the visuals for the articles has taken longer than preparing the text.

These all live on platforms I built from scratch and control myself. I worked hard for a few years to get to the point where a blog could earn me money and now can say I earn money from my writing on my own terms.

Not bad, right?

Yet I still find myself feeling bad because I haven’t been able to work on the newer projects I wanted to. Today I’m trying to work around that by writing it away.

I’ve created a communication machine

One morning when I had planned to plough through some writing, I got an email from a reader, asking for advice.

This was on a different site, on a subject that’s very difficult and very stressful. Whenever I get reader emails on this topic, I try to reply straight away, but a good, detailed answer can take a long time to put together.

I feel good about being able to earn from my ideas and my words, but I feel great about being able to use my ideas and words to provide help for people who need it, who feel as though they have nowhere else to turn to. I only wish that I could do more to help, but in truth there’s only so much that I as a writer can do. Still, when you think about it, that blog has touched more people than my art has…

That doesn’t mean I’m ever going to ditch creating art, but it does mean that I can start to feel good about weeks when the writing takes over.

When the writing starts to feel like a machine that I’m tied to, as it does from time to time, then it’s time to step back and take a look at the machine that I personally created. It’s mine, I can do what I want with it, and it helps people.

It’s still creativity, just not in the marks-on-paper sense.

See? I feel a lot better now!

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Today I’ve made myself a little proud and practiced what I’ve preached. Keeping a creative life alive when you’ve got a hectic schedule is difficult, and I’m no different from any other parent who has the full range of grown-up responsibilities. The only difference is I’ve given myself an additional range of creative tasks to potentially get frustrated over!

If you can’t fit in a big project, do something small that’s a step towards it.

I’ve known this for a long time – some weeks there are just too many things in the way to dive in to a time-consuming project. This week was just like that.

I did have a great creative result as an art technician though, designing a minimal sheep’s skull mask template for a dance performance. I’d planned to recreate it and document it for the blog this week, with a pdf to share. I haven’t been able to do that, but I’ll make sure to get on to it as soon as I can.

The main thing I’d wanted to do was to carry on one of my ideas from last week when I worked on a backlit drawing of Ste. I wanted to set up some photographs going 360° around him, then translate these into drawings and maybe paintings.

Next, I wanted to try animating the drawings (William Kentridge is the first influence to come to mind, of course).

With everything we had to manage this week, there just wasn’t time, so I used my studio assistant (which is the entire reason why I bought him in the first place!). I took some quick snaps, but I just couldn’t fit in the drawing stage for the scope I had in mind, so I made a little video and then a gif from my stills.

Small steps can take you in the right direction

So this wasn’t what I wanted to have done by the end of the week, but having a deadline (this post!) and a strong desire to have something – anything – as a visual note meant that I have a step towards the end goal.

I particularly like seeing the answers to some of my questions, such as:

How would it appear – as if the subject is moving, or if the observer is moving?

What effect does the light source have on that – moving around the model instead of moving the model?

Anyway, now I have something that I can look at and show to others to demonstrate the concept I’m thinking of expanding on, and that takes me further along than if I’d done nothing at all.

Not getting distracted…

Of course I’m interested in animation, but I can’t commit to another rabbithole! This is definitely something I’m going to pursue, but I have the money project to get on with as well as a few writing jobs to complete.

If you get stuck with your own creative process, try to tackle a smaller step, and pat yourself on the back for what you have managed to accomplish. It definitely helps!

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This week has been full of nostalgia. Memory lane has been more like a highway, with lots of reminders about the things I used to do and the person I used to be. What do I mean?

Echoes of my old studio

On Sunday we went to an Ikea showroom – Ste’s first time ever, and my first time in a very long time. It was strange to see so many of the same things I’d bought for my ceramics studio, like the plastic Trofast storage bins that held my clay slips and glazes.

Of course I was tempted to plonk down the cash to kit out my new studio to get it just the way I want it, but I think I’ll just take the furniture that gets kicked out of the rest of the house and try to work some magic with it.

Mixing glazes

Funnily enough, my first tech job the following day was reconstituting dried glazes and mixing some stoneware glazes from powder. It’s been over a solid decade since I’ve mixed any glazes, and as I stirred and brushed the rough glaze mixture through the sieve, I thought about all of the years I’d spent totally immersed in the world of ceramics.

I don’t do ceramic work these days, but I still love it. I’ve kept all of my glaze recipes and kiln books… knowing me, one day I might well jump back in. Even when you don’t carry on in a particular medium, nothing is entirely wasted – the skills you pick up stay with you, and I’m glad I’m able to keep on using them even if it’s not for my own practice.

The craft work

So after a few weeks, I finally managed to finish (subject to a bit of tinkering I suppose) a mammoth post about my craft business, why I folded it, why it didn’t work out like I wanted it to and what I could have done differently.

Thing is, I’ve spent a lot of the intervening years thinking of that business as something that failed, when it really did a lot for me and helped get me to where I am now. After I went to recover some product images from an old hard drive, I realised just how busy I’d been and how well it had done for me.

When you decide to move on from one phase of your life to another, it can be too easy to write off the past time as a failure or a waste, without recognising what it’s done for you. The truth is, nothing is ever totally wasted.

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