Myth: Full-time artists spend the majority of their time making new artwork.
This myth has been around for decades, and it’s one I used to believe, too… Until I became a full-time artist. Instead, my workload as an artist looks more like this:
You might think this workload would be frustrating for an artist. After all, artists want to be creating all the time, right? Lol… no.
Occasionally I do wish I had a bit more time to paint, but overall, I’m quite happy with this system.
Although these are the general overall stats, this is not what the everyday looks like. Rather than trying to meet each of these various tasks each and every day, I tend to work more in seasons. A season of creativity. A season of YouTube video editing. A season of newsletter writing. A season of packing orders. Now these seasons come in various lengths of time. I might spend a whole day writing newsletters. I might spend two weeks working on a painting. I might spend half the week on admin work and the other half brainstorming new illustration ideas. I can combine these tasks in various ways to fit my days, and in the end, somehow it works.
It might seem a bit too loose for some people, too rigid for others, but, in the words of Goldilocks, it’s “just right” for me. I don’t always feel like painting a picture and I don’t always feel like tending to admin tasks. But when I work according to my energy levels and attend to the tasks that feel right on a given day, I can trust that these “seasons” will ebb and flow as they need to. I might not hit every task in the short-term, but in the long-term, there’s balance.