Picture
A pastel portrait by artist Kathy Shell, from a photo, an example of turning an art form into a successsful service based business, attending to customers needs.
You need to treat art as a business if your business is art.

If you think that artists do not need to work, that it is all play and creating when you feel like it, then do everyone a favour and call it a hobby, don’t expect grants from public money, the world does not owe artists a living.

Art is our choice and we should not be subsidised if we are unable to earn our living at it anymore than someone, should get, a grant to go and play golf all day instead of going to work.

Lol, J, OK I have got that off my chest. Being a professional artist is going to involve very long hours of work and becoming multi skilled.

I have known dozens of talented artists who cannot earn a living at art, because they have not grasped that we need to develop four different types of skills to succeed in the arts and indeed, most professions.

 

1.       Talent We need the talent or skill to have something to sell.  Develop this. Make it a lifetime commitment to be on an ongoing search for knowledge and learn from everything and anything you can, while not contravening the copyright of others, make sure you didn’t have a fool for a teacher, by insisting on being ‘self taught’.
Yes, one can be self-guided, but expertise is learned from experts.

2.       Public Relations skills.If you are not skilled in public relations, then learn these skills. It might be easier to employ someone to do the PR for you, but the truth of the matter is, that unless you have an income aside from your art, few artists are going to have the funds to pay for a good PR representative. So learn how to do this for yourself.

3.       Business skills. It does not matter how well you create, paint or how good the items you have to sell are, nor how well you are able to market these, using your PR skills, if the business side of things breaks down and you make unwise choices accounting for and usuing the income you make.  There needs to be a balance of all skills.

4.       Diversify. Art is a non essential, item. If you look at how the stock market fluctuates, then realize that art is also going to fluctuate, only the fluctuation will be wider. 
No  one, can tell you in advance what artistic skills might peak nor suffer in the next fluctuation. 

Take the example of the need to diversify, from what happend during the last big depression to my own artistic family, who all survived based on the actions of one family member, my mother, the only one who diversified her skills. 

My father the architect, rated at the time as one of the top 6  architects in Australia, had no essential sevice skills and was unemployed during the last depression.

My uncle, one of Australia’s best musicians at the time, a man who during the peak of his career, left millions to charities due to the success of his career, had no other developed skill aside from his musicianship and he could not make enough money to provide a home for or feed his family during that depression as  people would not pay for his, non essential service, skill.
 
My mother, a dress designer, was able to diversify, from making high end fashion to designing clothing to fit people with deformity, then accept commissions to make military uniforms and her income as a young woman in her twenties, supported three families of six adults and three children, all because she was prepared to diversify her artistic skills when the need arose and not be too proud to take orders or work with heavy harsh on the hands, military materials.

When I informed my family that I intended to be an artist, they were 100% behind my doing this, they never told me that ‘I would not be able to earn my living at the arts’, as many tell artists. They did however insist that I have diverse talents and essential skills.

Back then, I did a science course as my essential services ‘fall back on, if I needed it’, diversification from art. These days with my interest in web design and reliance on computers I would probably choose to study for and have IT Jobs as my essential industry, fall back, should I have times when art needed  subsidising with other work.

Develop varied and essential service skills and your integrity as an artist is protected and you have the financial stability you need as a base to develop a successful artistic life. Happy creating :-)


 
Picture
Another portrait commision by Kathy Shell, in artist's pastels, completed to a clients instructions, showing the combination of artistic talent, PR skills of working with the client and the business ability of marketing commissioned portaiture as a service.
 
 
Picture
Reviewing my goals to becoming a better blogger.
Reviewing my action plans to share my creative skills though this blog.
Reviewing my action plan and ‘to do list’, to become a better blogger.

My work course on how to become a better blogger in 31 days has been met with some frustration as my server weebly was hit by a death ping attack and they were several days working around the clock bringing in experts and purchasing new servers, trying to overcome a denial of service attack.  Eventually they were forced to go to a great deal of expense providing a more powerful new server to counter this problem.  This threw me out of my late night work on the web routine and I began sitting inactively at the computer during what was previously, may be active afternoons.  Here i am today, mid afternoon and still at my computer.  How quickly do we slip back into non constructive bad habits?  What’s the point of trying to write a creative lifestyle blog, (this one), and two active lifestyle blogs, and becoming a sloth?

The work load to do my assignments in the 31 days to becoming a better blogger, has escalated and I find myself still striving to complete some of the preliminary work that is to get my own domain, for this blog pointing to the correct location and striving to get a google ranking for my new owned domain name artslim.org.   In the mean while I struggle to find time to exercise and keep up with my house work and I think it’s time to remind myself not to become obsessed in my creative work(in this instance, learning to have better blogs), to the extent where I fall back into a pattern of self physical neglect, and become sedentary again.    Keeping myself ‘in check’, staying motivated to self care as well as trying to help influence and motivate others not to make the same, becoming too inactive, mistakes I made in the past, due to a creative life, is why I started my http://www.artslim.org  blog.

So ‘I am here’, I’m just taking a step back from writing actual blog content while I learn more about how to improve how I do this and keep my time management principles  and slimming goals in mind.

A lot of the work I am doing at the moment is a once off effort that will be well rewarded in the future.  Like returning to studies, it’s worthwhile as long as I keep aware of maintaining a balanced lifestyle and make myself a definite, ‘clock on and off’ time.

I have completed 4 hours in studying how to be a better blogger so far today.  4 hours is the total time frame a day x 6 days a week,  I have set up in my action plan to have better blogs. As my set up phase, this initial 31 days is a 1/ priority of importance and urgency for me, I am prepared to double my allocated time now, and go back on line from 8pm till 12mn in the evening during the month of October, and this will then allow me two days a week off from writing for the remainder of the year which will bring me back to this job that I love, refreshed and eager to write.

Now having planned why I believe it will be OK to increase my computer study time and how I will credit myself with this extra time spent and made allowanced for how I will still fit in my physical activity and the bare bones of scaled back home maintenance, I’m happy with a new action plan with a definite upper cap, on how long a day I will allow myself to be sedentary, and a definite slotted in bed time.

Tips for creative people:-

*Make definite working hours, self employed creative work is never finished, you need to know in advance, when you intend to knock f, then ‘do it’.

*Decide in advance when you will go to bed and get up.  Self employed creative people can work around the clock on an adrenaline high, Bi Polar disorder is common amongst creative people and even can be mimicked in behaviour.  The highs associated with Bipolar can even be managed by pre setting obsessive tendency restraints in place.  If you don’t have ‘a boss’, when you are not ‘on a creative high’, set yourself restraints you believe will be in the interest of your own, physical and emotional health, while still allowing yourself to be highly creative.  Then when you are ‘on a creative high’, keep that action plan you have made, where you can see it, and ‘stick to it’.

Note:-  I come from a family of eccentric, highly creative people, believe me I know what I’m talking about here, obsessive creativity out of control, can be very self and family destructive, make reasonable limits and you will live longer, create more and enjoy the fruits of loving supporting relationships. It is worth curbing the extremes of our creative desires and your creations will not suffer, if you live a decade longer by caring for yourself, you will get more work completed than if you never clock off for proper meals, exercise, balanced lifestyle or sleep.

LOL, spoken by one who had a stroke at 32 because I thought I could live on 5 hours sleep a night, work late at night then hike up a mountain to look at the view, with a 7 year old child on my back.  Believe me; I know about excessive, creative, enthusiastic, self destructive behaviour.  Please LOVE YOURSELF MORE than your creations, and hold it in check with pre planning. J.