Advice for Artists Just Getting Started
I was recently interviewed for a podcast, The Art Coaching Club, and we chatted a lot about what I’ve learned and how I got started as an artist. This seemed like a fun and helpful topic to dive into on my blog, so here is a bit of my journey!
Before becoming an artist, my career was in early childhood education- I was an art teacher at Montessori schools and also taught in museums. As you know, teachers don’t make buckets of money, so it was not as daunting of a career to step away from as if I had been making six+ figures or in a corporate setting. I was able to scale back my hours teaching (also super helpful that my boss and my position at the school were flexible) by adding a second source of income. This was enrichment lessons where the families enrolled their children directly with me and I earned more per hour than as a full time teacher. After dropping to 20 hours a week in 2016 to go to graduate school, I stayed part time in order to free up my afternoons to make art.
If you are shifting to a career as an artist, my advice is to find a way to replace your income before you reduce your hours.
This could be by starting to sell your work, or by tutoring for example. I did this for about four years before I fully left the school setting. And a part of my story (like everyone else’s) involved the pandemic! We moved to NC in 2020 and I began substitute teaching, which let me control the amount of hours I worked in a week. My business had been growing every year and was on track to fully replace my teaching salary. I knew I could count on it/myself to keep it growing, so when I had my first son in spring 2022, I didn’t go back to teaching in a school setting at all.
If you feel called to be an artist you just know it- I wasn’t fully happy until I leaned into this part of myself, and I am so glad I took the risk.
When I was making the decision to switch to part time and give it try as an artist, I found the book The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna so beautifully helpful. The author suggests you ask your art if it wants to pay the bills, and I thought that was a wonderful question! You might need or want to keep your day job or career, and if your desire to be creative is strong enough you will find the time to do it! Being a full-time artist doesn’t make someone more creative than someone with a different job! It’s about what works for you in your life/current situation.
There is one last and biggest piece of advice I have: improve your skills. Maybe if you are interested in reading this it is because you are starting out. And if you are at the beginning of your beautiful lifelong journey as an artist it is important to acknowledge that you have a lot to learn and a lot of ways you can improve your technical skill as an artist. This was HUGE in my journey. I was interested in painting but wasn’t good at it! I did photography and collage because I could be creative and make use of color, composition, artful ideas, aesthetics etc, and it didn’t require me to have drawing and painting skills.
In 2017 I took online oil painting lessons, and they changed my life- the lessons unlocked my creativity and I finally felt ready to become the artist I was meant to be.
Since then I have taken several in person and online courses and I always plan to! Unless you have had your retrospective at an internationally known museum, you have room to learn and practice! Commit to just being a learner and you will bloom as an artist too.
P.S. If my painting style excites you, check out my online course, The 3 Hour Still Life- now enrolling!
In my home studio (the 2nd bedroom of our apartment that my husband so graciously let me take over completely) back in 2018, the year I first started selling work with a gallery.
Teaching summer camps at the Frist Art Museum in 2017. I loved being a teacher and am so grateful for my decade sharing art with little ones! For now I am teaching painting to adults, but hope to work with children again in the future.