Making time for making art 🧑‍🎨

Making time for making art is difficult if you are involved with the content economy. If you make content of any type, you probably have run into my experience. You run out of time to make the art you had originally liked making. What the heck is up with this? What happened to the artist making art?

Survival in the content economy is rough. It can be lot of work for not a lot of reward at first. Unless you are lucky or somehow have an existing following. I would say that no secret exists. You have to do a lot of free work before you can break into a field. That goes for many. In my personal experience, I begged a company to work for them for free to program for them. It was difficult because it took time away from them. They had to do work to set me up a computer workstation as well as company owned user accounts. Granted I learned everything on my own.

Learning on your own says a lot. You have to make sure you do it the correct way. I paid for drawabox critiques much like I paid to work for the company. I should touch again how I paid to work for the company. I paid my University to count it as an intership. So in addition to the work for the company I did, I have to write term papers about my experience in fixing bugs in the companies system. I paid in terms of having to drive to the physical work location and the time I spent working for them. I had to do a lot of work for free. If you can get paid, do take advantage of it. But many fields require you pay to work for free. I would have worked for the company regardless of paying for college credits.

Now how do you make time for the art you want to make? That is hard. You have to sit yourself down and perhaps even put off some of your ideas for years. You need a lot of practice. You should also try to make what you want to. You need to reserve some time in your life say 10 minutes or even a half hour at first to try. Although we don't always live in a friendly world.

In pre-pandemic times I used to wake up at 5:00 a.m. daily so I could first do art practice. Meaning drawabox exercises and then figure drawing. I did this for about an hour and a half. I did this because I worked from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. but I lost three hours commuting. Then when I got home I was often too tired to do anything else but go to bed. For a long time this was my routine. I caught up on sleep on the weekend and I was able to draw more.

A lot of what I do, I would not recommend. I will admit that I have been trying to build an audience of people who are interested in what I do. But let me tell you about some of my mistakes. Well I can't call everything I do a mistake. As I completed drawabox, my critiques on drawabox.com serve as a journey of my art career. I had never been encouraged to pursue art. This was because in my family it was a hard way to make money. But the truth is that it is always hard to make money at all.

I would not recommend doing what I do. I have a programming background so not everyone can do what I do. Because of this, I made my own website, many art applications to help myself. But what I sacrificed was making the art I wanted to make. I had been fitting my art in recently and I learned about the bug characters I wanted to make. In addition to that, I have been making tons of art tutorial videos for my YouTube channel to help artists. All of this takes me away from me making the art I wanted to make.

I can't say you should do what I did, but I did what I did because the tools weren't on the market. If you want to build an audience, make a website, linktr.ee, and social media accounts where you can share your art. Unless you would rather just make the art you want to make and not care. Every social media has a different algorithm. Even having your own website means you have to know search engine optimization aka seo to optimize for the algorithms of search engines. Perhaps you haven't made anything you don't think is worth sharing. Try sharing it and it could be worth a try. Just don't let it harm your confidence.

Make time for your art dammit. Please! For me...

About Lars Barnabee 🐝 hey that's me