Juggling parenting and artistic ambitions
3yr
Smithies
Hi guys! I am 29, nearly 30, and I started drawing a couple of years ago, and I have been really intent on levelling up my skills. I am self employed in a non-art-related career, and spend my spare time doing what I can to try and get to a point where I can produce art that I'm proud of, and hopefully sell online (in a part time capacity) in the future.
I'm pregnant, and due in less than 2 weeks! I would love to hear from those of you who are parents yourselves, looking to break into the professional world of art. How have you balanced caring for a child, maintaining a good relationship with your partner, an unrelated job, and progressing as an artist all together? Is it possible? Give me hope! haha
I'm 40 with two boys, 5 and 10, and I share custody of the older one. I've managed to carve out enough space and time to still have a side job doing gallery work and live caricature, and now I'm doing outdoor art fairs. It'd totally possible, though it's hard in those early baby days. Don't lose heart, find inspiration wherever you can, and hopefully you have a supportive coparent. Don't compare yourself to other artists,its your journey!
The early baby days are so hard! 13 days in today and I have barely thought of touching a pencil! Hopefully I will before Christmas!
I have two kids and have been juggling all the stuff you mention for years. Here's something I wrote on Facebook for a friend of mine a few months ago. She has a baby and asked if I had any tips on how work drawing and painting around her family and other commitments. Maybe it will be helpful to you as well.
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My biggest advice is to set your goals really, really, really small to begin. Like, way smaller than you think is reasonable. Also, you can take advantage of a psychological thing where the hardest part is usually starting something. You can combine these in really effective ways. When Charlie was little he was a really tough baby, and there was very little time or sleep. My goal then was to open up my sketchbook and make one line every day. That's it! Most days I would think "well shit, I've got my sketchbook open already, I might as well draw a little more". But some days I said "nope—my goal is 1 line and I did it, now I'm going to take a nap!". (and of course, some days I would just be too tired to even make that one line). Eventually I was doing that consistently enough to raise the goal to just a face or a hand or something. But if I found myself skipping too much I'd lower the goal back down.
On a related note, I'd recommend killing whatever notion you have of how much time is "worth it" for art. I used to think it wasn't worth painting if I couldn't get 2 or 3 hours of uninterrupted time to work. As you well know, 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time is basically nonexistent with a family. So, 5-10 minutes of painting is better than 0 minutes. Find ways to be OK with less. You may need to simplify your subjects along with this, so you can actually finish some smaller pieces. It's not a good time to work on your life's masterpiece.
Another piece of advice related to that is to put in a little work optimizing setup and cleanup, with more emphasis on optimizing setup. If you're in a world where you might have 15 minutes tops, you can't afford to have all of that 15 minutes be setup time. Eliminate your excuses and make it as easy to start as possible. Can you leave a small easel out somewhere, with the palette ready to go? Can you leave the sketchbook out and open with a pencil on top? Can you set things up somewhere that you'll see or have to walk past regularly, rather than tucked away in the spot you never go to? Keep all that in mind for cleanup as well—leave it ready to go for next time.
Also—are there things you can change or compromise on to make setup/cleanup time faster? If you really want to paint, is there a way you can paint digitally and be happy? Or could you switch to pastels? Or just stick to black and white?
Last piece of advice—get creative in finding the "cracks" of time you have and how you can fit art into them. For example, in pre-COVID times I got a lot of art done on my train ride into the city. I also used to be the first one up and could often cram in 5-10 minutes. I also found lots of little skill-building exercises that I could do in the margins of my notebook in meetings at work, or waiting for something to load on my computer. These were mostly little mindless, rote exercises, but at least I could feel like I was progressing on something art related.
Anyway, hope this helps! I love talking about this stuff. And if you start doing any of this, I'd be interested in seeing literally anything you work on—even if it's just a single line! I think there's something valuable about having some community for this type of thing.
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That last paragraph was written for my friend, but I would also love to see anything you work on as well! I do think it's really important to have some community for stuff like this, and this seems like a good place for that!
Tim Dose's comments are spot-on. If I could just add a few examples to his great points.
1. Really small goals. I like "drawing a single line" for the day. Two things to add in during that brief time - relax your hand, and tell yourself "this is enough for right now". After grumbling for years I remember when I just sat for a few minutes on a Saturday morning and tried to draw the little whisps of steam coming up from my coffee cup - it felt great. If you have a tendency to be harsh and self-critical, you don't want to allow that harshness to come in during that short time. Your minutes of art time can be relaxing, peaceful, and patient - like you're laying one stone of a future foundation.
2. Amount of time that is "worth it" - I had the wrong mindset for years after the birth of my daughter. I would think "well, if I can't do a block of 3 hours oil painting, might as well not even try." Not doing anything gradually made me anxious and bitter. I finally after years accepted that I was not going to have blocks of time. So I changed media - from oils to drawing and watercolor. Watercolor especially helped me have an outlet - only short blocks of time were needed; the pieces get worse if you overwork them, anyway. So, like Tim said, allow the media to be flexible.
3. Setup - great advice. If you can leave something out to work on, you are much more likely to actually work on it. When your baby is young, maybe a heavy easel could be in the living room, something they can't reach or climb up on (for a few years). And clean up, as Tim said, may be a factor depending on your medium. For me, watercolors had minimal brush cleaning time compared to oils.
4. Get creative in finding those "cracks" of time. Definitely. Making your art part of the family I found helpful - drawing the baby while it sleeps or your partner while they do bedtime routine. I would also suggest be on the lookout for time wasting. Lack of sleep will be a problem for a while and I know when I go short on sleep, I tend to waste more time, endlessly scrolling news or social media because I didn't feel sharp enough to tackle a real art project. For me, being tired and spending time on devices can become a self-defeating mindstate where the self-talk is "failure".
5. In a Draftsmen episode a while ago, Marshall made a point that "most of art school is training your brain how to see and how to think." This has helped me unclench from the mindset of "trying to make a body of work." By all means a body of work and selling it is a great goal, but don't let doubt creep in if you only have time to sketch - it is not worthless.
Congratulations on your baby and I look forward to seeing your work!
Thanks so much for sharing that! Baby hasn't arrived yet, and I don't have much of an idea of what to expect, but these tips sound very helpful. I definitely have a bit of an attitude that if I don't have X hours to plug away then there's no point getting started so I definitely need to change that! And now I'll have an excuse to leave my sketchbook lying around, so thank you!
