How I Prepped for a Painting Break
I have a confession… I took a whole month off from painting. If you follow along with my newsletter or on social media, you wouldn’t have known because I continued to post regularly, my newsletter still went out as usual, and it all happened while I was away from my computer and out of the country for the most part.
In October, Vasya and I headed out of town and across the pond for a long awaited trip to Scotland with my parents. This trip had been on the books for months and as our departure date got closer, I started to think about how I could plan ahead so that I could take a much needed break. Despite being gone, I still wanted to stay true to my word for 2023: Consistency. I also didn’t like the idea of ghosting my followers while I was on vacation. As I continue to grow my art practice and start to pivot it into a side business, I am trying to stay committed to building something that is sustainable. I have a full time job, I have hobbies, I have friends and family, and a life outside of making my art and I needed this break. So I started to think proactively about how I could show up for my art without having to be attached to my phone or a computer. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how I planned for being “out of the studio” for a month.
Batching Content
I try to be really strategic about batching my content each week when possible. My version of batching means that I try to work on one task for a stretch of time. That “stretch” can be as short as 15 minutes, but ideally it is an hour or two. The types of work I try to batch include:
Planning sessions for what I want to try and accomplish in the next month
Writing the copy for blog posts
Formatting blog posts for the website
Taking final photographs of completed artwork from the last couple weeks
Organizing the photos and videos on my phone that document my art practice
Writing captions for upcoming social media posts
Scheduling social media content
Drafting newsletters
By batching content I can make the most of the limited time that I have day to day.
I use a Google Sheet to plan out my content in advance and to keep track of ideas for later. This makes posting on social media regularly particularly easy since I can copy and paste content when I need it.
Planning Ahead
Batching content also means (hopefully) that I am able to work ahead most of the time. Ideally the content I am working on today won’t become public to my audience for a couple weeks. As much as possible, I try for my public facing profiles: blog posts, newsletter, Instagram and Pinterest to be a few weeks behind what I am actually working on in the studio. This means that I have a little bit of wiggle room for both planned fun things, such as vacation, or unplanned things like I’m not feeling well.
Examples of Planning Ahead from the Blog
I actually created my blog post A Very Special Car Portrait mid-summer when I finished the painting, but I didn’t share it on my blog or on social media until September to coincide with when the Marshall Steam Museum was going to have the painting as part of their annual fundraiser’s silent auction. My blog post How to Paint from Reference Photos was a stand alone piece that I knew I could fit into my schedule whenever I had a gap to fill.
Examples on Social Media
My Summer Vibes Project gave me a great opportunity to create a small stack of paintings that I could share across platforms at a slower rate than it took me to create them. I try to focus on sharing the process behind one piece of artwork each week from a variety of perspectives. For example, for one painting I might have a reel of how I prepped the painting, a time-lapse reel of painting from start to finish, and a series of photographs of the final piece. Three pieces of content from the same painting. When I started my painting break I had five finished paintings that I hadn’t shared publicly yet, which is five weeks of social media content. Social media can take a lot of time and while I enjoy it, I also need boundaries. Focusing on one piece of artwork allows my social media posting schedule to be manageable.
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Automation
Scheduled social media posts on Instagram.
Automation is a big one that I continue to try and incorporate into how I am working on the business side of my art. The biggest piece of automation that I try to use is scheduling content. I really do enjoy creating content. I love to take photographs and videos of what I am working on and come up with new and interesting ways to show how I work. But, I want to spend time painting and living my life, not attached to my computer or my phone all the time, especially when some content (like Instagram) can have a shelf life of only a couple hours per post (if you are lucky). Before I took my break and literally left the country, I tried really hard to schedule as much content as possible. While I was out, I scheduled:
Three blog posts: Creating Art from Reference Photos, Taking a Risk, and How I Prepped for a Painting Break. (Yup, I wrote a post about how I was preparing for a break as I was about to take the break.)
Two Newsletters: One for October 5 and October 26. Even though I would be back by October 26, I wanted it done and ready to go.
Fifteen Instagram Posts (through October 26):
Twenty Pinterest Pins. My Pinterest is generally even further behind what I am working in my studio.
I’m not going to lie, it was a lot of work trying to get everything organized and scheduled in advance of leaving on vacation. I knew that this trip was coming and so I tried to be strategic with how I shared content so that I would have enough to get me through my break. I did worry that something would glitch or not work while I was away - I have had all of my scheduled content disappear before without any warning or explanation - but I was generally able to forget about it. It was extremely satisfying to disconnect while feeling like “the studio” was still chugging along.
Now that I am back and well rested after my break, I am excited, if a bit nervous, to get back into painting and I’m excited to share all of the ideas I have bouncing around my head from my trip to Scotland and as I dive into my Art to Print course I shared in my last blog: Taking a Risk. Stay tuned!