New Prints + A New Year = New Focus
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do treat winter as a time to reflect and set new goals for growth. Here’s what I’ve learned that helps…
A New Survival Strategy – the Artist’s Edition
My body told me in no uncertain terms that it was time to get away from screens. Here’s how it told me, and what I did to right this ship.
The Great Mixed Media Experiment
The past couple of months have been super busy. I've started taking wholesale orders with some of my prints and greetings cards, and since I'm a one-woman operation, a big order can take days to fill. I've been working hard to come up with a weekly schedule that gives me enough time to make new work, though--it seems like an easy task, but it's been hard to carve out enough time for myself. I'm delighted that my new business is growing, don't get me wrong--it just means that now I have to learn to prioritize a bit better--and that means prioritizing myself, too. A friend of mine told me that I needed to create a Google calendar. "Make blocks of times you need for all of the things you want to get done in a week," he said. "Then move those blocks around into a time frame that works." It sounded simplistic when he said it, but I did it anyway. And you know what? It worked. My method had been too simple: I'd simply written down 2-3 things that I had to do each day: deadlines for...
Finding Balance: or, How I Realized I’m a Workaholic
There's one thing that I constantly struggle with: finding balance between my work and the rest of my life. I have this tendency to get super focused on things I enjoy in my work, and spend countless hours on them, to the point that other parts of my life fall way down on the to-do list. Sometimes I get focused on things that aren't necessarily much fun, but feel like big priorities for, say, a new business. For example: I recently decided that I needed to redo all the photography and mockups in my Etsy shop. This was a daunting task, even though it could be done while binge watching Lucifer. I knew it would take a long time (even with the great mockup I had for placing card designs), and it was one of those tasks that, once I start, I just want to plow through and finish. And besides--once some new photos are up, then the old ones just look extra bad. (Kind of like when you starting painting inside a house.) So there was all this pressure (self-applied, of course), to do that as...