First week of self-employment

My first week of self-employment has been going well! I cleaned up my studio space as well as my entire apartment over the weekend and have mostly stuck to the daily schedule I had set for myself back in July in preparation for my self-employment. It’s only been two working days since my last day at my data science job, but things have been very busy!

What I’m working on

I decided to not work on the “Sand, Sea, and Sky” collection because I tried working on two of the paintings over the weekend and it was feeling like a chore and not fun. And that is not the point of the rest of this year and how I want to start out my full-time painter life. So that’s off the project list and instead I decided to paint a 12”x16” painting of a misty seascape and finished it and started another one. I think I’m going to keep doing these until I run out of motivation/inspiration or run out of canvases.

I’m also working on writing my artist statement and it’s just words on paper right now. Not much to say about it. 

Inputs

• I’m still reading The Practice by Seth Godin and The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.

• I’m still listening to Radical Candor by Kim Scott on audiobook 

Outputs

• I went to a friend of a friend’s joint photography exhibition which was fun and I learned/re-learned photography/composition concepts at the talk they did at the exhibition

• I started volunteering at a food pantry today. I packed produce and it was a nice brain off and repetitive activity. I’m planning on volunteering at a regular interval after I come back from all my traveling at the end of September through October.

That’s all for now. I’m still trying to figure out my schedule. I was worried that I would be a little aimless and not know what to do with myself after I left my job and end up wasting time trying to figure out what to do but that’s not the case! I think that I may be doing a little too much now, so we’ll see how things settle over time.