How I Made Time For Art

-
Finding time for my art is a challenge. There is very little time in the day after life tasks, chores, and work. Now that I have a baby I have even less time than before. The most difficult things were learning how to make time for myself. Believe me it was hard. I had to strategize the best time to take a shower and brush my teeth while taking care of a newborn baby.
The next challenge was figuring out how to manage other parts of my life and manage my other projects. I realized I had to change a few things
  • I had to ask myself if a project/task was worth doing.  I have a lot of interests in many areas. I love learning and experimenting with different art styles and media. Those areas specifically included digital art, watercolor, gouache painting, acrylic painting, animation and the list can go on forever. I was just doing too much and unfortunately, all of them required time. Although I like learning about all these different subjects and topics, none of it was productive towards any of my goals. I needed to make things.  So I decided to just focus more on refining what I know. So for now my learning will only focus on Artrage and myPaint for digital simulation of real traditional media.

  • Next, I identified where I could gain more time. Where was my time being spent? Most of my time was spent on social media. I was on almost everything. I spent too much time on reading blogs, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, google+, Youtube, and deviantArt. So 5 months ago, I decided to reduce the amount of time I spent by reducing the networks I was on. I decided that I would only use twitter to keep me connected while I re-evaluated my other social sites. I decided that I would keep Facebook, twitter, and Instagram (I made my account private) active but all other sites would go into hiatus or closed. Tumblr, LinkedIn and Google+ have been set to hiatus. I check them rarely and I don’t update often unless I get a comment on something I wrote myself in the past.  I’ve closed my deviantArt account because I’ve fallen out of “favorite” with the site. It’s not pleasant to go there anymore. The site looks like a mess. Anyway, many of the artist I follow are on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Also, I closed my Youtube account. I don’t have the time to create, manage and promote videos.  I’ll eventually revisit the video idea, but it will more than likely be in the form of live streams and quick short twitter videos.

  • Develop a strategy to manage active Social Media Sites only 30 min a day. I spent a long time researching this and it gets really detailed. I will explain how I did this in detail in another post. For now, here is an overview. I use Feedly to watch the blogs I like, buffer to share my work and Instapaper to read articles I find interesting.
Additional Resources
Finding Time by by Bet Borgeson – Suggest adding schedules and deadlines to make more time.
Ask the Art Professor: How Do You Balance a Full-Time Job, Kids and Your Own Art? Huffington Post. Your family is a motivation to use the available time to make something.  Also, allow yourself to discover new passions after sacrificing.
10+ Ways to Make Time for Your Art: An Interview with Rice Freeman-Zachery Empty Easel has a good list and Q. A. to get anyone started.
The post How I Made Time For Art appeared first on T. R. McLeod Blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I Started Drawing

-
Like most children I have always drawn. All children have to draw something in elementary or primary school at one point or another. However, I stopped around Middle School to Highschool about the time that I started homeschooling. This was mainly due to my father. He did not believe that there was any fundamental need for art. That included all art. I was not allowed to listen to music or watch TV other that PBS and I was not allowed to leave the house. The first comicbook that my mother bought me was from Malibu Comics. She also told me not to let my father find out that I had it. Unfortunately, my father eventually found out a few months later, tore it up in front of me and tossed it into the trash. The man was insane. Also, my homeschool education was kind of shitty compared to others. Halfway through around maybe my second or third year of highschool that he gave up and left me to my own to study and create my own curriculum. I remember the exact moment that happen...
Read more

May Update

-
Things are going well with me. I am still adjusting to getting things done while being a new mother. I’m still trying to figure out how my mom got things done while having three children and working full time. I’m only working part time with one baby and it seems like there is just  not enough hours in the day. It’s all about trial and error. Work I'm happy to say that I am now in the field that I got my degree in.  I’m learning so much and I am beyond grateful for the opportunity. I honestly felt like giving up and changing careers to something that would be a soul suck. Glad I stuck with it. Now my main goal is to take my engineering in training exam. For that I need to study. So I am going to dedicate an hour each day this summer to studying. I plan on taking it before fall season  TV shows are back. I have to be realistic with myself, I won’t study when my shows are on.  So wish me luck. Art Well I have been taking things s...
Read more

Update

-
Well I had originally started a blog because I wanted to practice writing every day. So far I have not kept up with doing so. I’ve had my mind on so many things lately that journal about some things didn’t make sense to do at the time until I figured things out. Art Well I closed my account on DeviantArt. The plan was to make things during the year and then come back later and upload a tone of stuff. However, while I was doing so I realized that I was making a lot of progress with doing rather than following. At the same time I went back to Facebook and found a lot of artists there. I had a thought then that between Facebook, tumblr, and twitter, I’m covered in the whole art networking world. So yeah…. School I finished my capstone and now I only have one more class to take. I have to wait all the way until August to take another class but luckily I am officially done. I’m a master. I don’t plan to go back to school until later years (I’m talking about between 40 to 5...
Read more