I’ve been self-employed full-time for over four years now and it’s really interesting to look at
how much of that time is actually spent making art, what art I’m making, what it’s for, and what
I’m up to outside of that. So I spent the month of March keeping a note of all the art I made and
I thought I’d share it with you. Every month is different but I do think this was quite a typical
one for me and I’ll talk about where things might vary from month to month as we go along.
I was actually kind of nervous about making this video once I’d totted up the total amount of art,
because it doesn’t seem like a lot at all and the sort of imposter feelings start creeping in.
An artist who barely makes art. But I’m here to be honest and I’m sure different people will have
different experiences. I’d actually love to hear how much art you all
manage to make in a month. I know that I want to tip the scales a bit when it comes to
how I balance work-work and creative-work.
I try to work in my sketchbook every day. I get up early just to squeeze that time in before work.
But what I realised while actually tracking the amount I do in my sketchbook is that,
it can take me several days to just finish one spread,
and that little bit of sketchbook time in the morning is always the first thing to get knocked
off the schedule if I’m particularly busy with work- which I was in March.
In total there are only I think 6? sketchbook spreads and the majority of those are pages where
I mainly stuck things in. When I want to commit to that personal creative time but don’t have the
energy or ideas to do actual painting or drawing, I at least like to come up with a nice spread
with art that I already have lying around, giving my loose drawings a home. So I had these
test prints from when I was getting this artwork ready to upload on Inprnt. I stuck these in on the
same page where I already had this painting of a pomegranate flower which I edited onto the final
Pomegranate piece so I thought that would all go nicely together. I also had this page from
an old botanical journal and I thought it would be nice to print my pomegranate painting onto it,
just to add some kind of creative element to the spread. And that’s also why I added
these swatches. For that, I just used a
water-brush and a watercolour palette so there was no prep or clean-up required at all.
I also stuck in
this painting that I turned into a greetings card for Patreon. This is the original painting
but again, it was just on a loose piece of paper so I stuck it in here and just to make the page
more interesting added some scraps of things I had lying around and stamped some words onto the page.
Every month I also keep one set of the Patreon rewards I’ve just sent out
so I created this record of the ‘Lucky You’ bundle I sent out in early March. So these
aren’t the originals, just a copy of the prints and stickers I sent out.
For actual drawings and paintings in my sketchbook, there’s this random doodle
of an alligator that I’ll stick in at some point. This took longer than it looks like it would have!
It was a good morning sketching session but as I mentioned, I end up having all that time to myself
and ending up with just something like this to show for it. When I have a load of work to do,
it doesn’t always feel justified to spend an hour in the morning on something so...
irrelevant. But I was happy to get to spend that time making art.
There’s this sketchbook spread you’ll have seen in one of my Sketchbook With Me
videos. At least when I’m filming I feel a bit more justified in experimenting with things - I
really need to get out of that mindset though. This sketchbook page would have
been worth my time whether I was filming it or not and I need to remember that.
And my favourite bit of time in my sketchbook last month was an evening I spent on Zoom with a friend
drinking wine and painting together. I didn’t have a reference or anything for this one,
I just felt like painting waterlilies and went off the image I had in my mind. The
casual setting made it really easy to just go with the flow,
paint and have a laugh. Before I knew it, I had a painting I was really happy with,
and my friend made progress on a poster she was making for her bedroom. This over here is just
a sketch that I made for a future Patreon bundle that won't be coming out until October- as you
can see, it's halloween themed so that's just the original sketch that I've stuck in there.
And then still on topic with that, every month, I create and ship out bundles of
prints and stickers to people on Patreon. It’s been a great way to keep me creating,
coming up with ideas and I genuinely think my art has improved as I try to keep
innovating and sending people something different every time. There's a real
difference in the bundles I was sending out in the beginning compared to the work I'm doing now.
So the theme this month was Pets in honour of Thierry’s 2-year adoption-anniversary and 5th
birthday. You already saw the parrot painting that I turned into a greetings card,
I did that a month earlier because I needed to order in the greetings
cards and know they’d be here in time to ship out in early April. So during March, I painted
this rabbit to turn into a print for all Patrons that get physical rewards. When it came time to
actually making prints though, I wasn’t in love with this and decided to make a print out of the
deer painting you saw in my sketchbook. Not quite a pet but still sticking with the animal theme. I
also created this sticker sheet and an additional sticker for the people who got the greetings card.
This was also the last month that I was offering original paintings as one of the perks. I wanted
to do something really special since this would be the last original painting I‘d be
sending out so I painted custom pet portraits for each of the three Patrons in that tier.
I won’t show them properly since I don’t know if they’ve arrived at their destinations yet
and I want those Patrons to be the first to see these paintings finished. But I will say
that I absolutely love how all of these came out. These are actually probably my favourite
paintings I’ve sent out in all of my time on Patreon. I can’t lie, it was a labour of love,
I had to start again at least 3 times for each of them, one of them I did five times
before I was happy with it- when it’s a custom portrait for someone, there is just that added
pressure to get their fur-baby just right. But then, I wouldn’t normally have so much of a reason
to keep pushing through a really difficult piece, and like I said, in the end, it was so worth it.
Also, for the same Patrons, at the beginning of March, I completed
these original paintings for the Lucky You bundle.
Outside of work I do in my sketchbook and on Patreon, I tend to have at least one
project going on in the background each month. It might be a personal project,
like creating work to re-stock my shop or update my portfolio. For example, this month,
April- I finished a painting for my mum's birthday. Very occasionally it’ll be work for
a client. And sometimes it’s work that I’m making a video about. For March,
it was a mixture of a personal project that also doubled up as a video for this channel.
I was working on making art for our flat, as you can see back here, and you can see the video of
that linked above and in the description. I finished that at the start of this month but
some of the art was made in March and that took a lot of my creative time. I made this
Beetroot painting which you can also see a real-time video for, again, linked below, there’s
this painting of our building, this garlic drawing and I started planning this botanical painting.
I also started planning for a packaging design commission I’ll be getting into for a client
in the next couple of months- but I can’t show you any of that. But that just entailed some
brainstorming and preliminary sketches- which is honestly one of the hardest and
most time-consuming aspects of creative work for me, the idea-generating stage.
Speaking of time, I also kept track of the number of hours I was working on art during the
first week of planning for this video. So out of those first seven days, I spent 4 days
working on art, 2 hours for each of the first three days and five hours on the last day.
The amount of time I spend on art each week really varies though. Sometimes it’s
like this, sometimes it’s all day every day if there’s one big project I’m working on.
And some weeks I probably spend an hour on art in total.
So you might be wondering what else I’m doing with my time if it’s not making
art. Planning content, and filming and editing videos takes up a lot of time,
and just the general work of updating and maintaining a presence online. I have
a lot of emails to respond to and when my shop is stocked that’s at least a full day, usually two or
three, every week fulfilling orders. Honestly, I don’t know where all the time goes. This was
a really interesting investigation for me into how I’m spending my time. And you know what,
now that I’ve talked it out, I think I made more art than I initially felt like I had.
Again, I’d love to know what your art-life balance looks like,
whatever position you’re in whether hobbyist, part-time or full-time.
Otherwise, thanks so much for joining me for this one and I’ll see you soon for the next one. Bye!