Mid-September marks one year since resigning from my teaching position and becoming a full-time artist!
After graduating with my Fine Art degree in 2005, being a full-time artist is something that I have always strived for … who knew it would take me 18 years to figure out how to make it work?!
So, I’m here. My ‘day job’ is ARTIST.
My primary teaching career was the perfect stepping stone to help me get where I am and I’m so grateful that I had that to not only maintain my income as I grew my art business on the side, but also keep my passion for art alive as I saw it through the innocence of children’s eyes every day. I absolutely loved imbuing my passion for art into the minds of the tamariki I taught and I am always thankful to hear that my teaching made an impact.
At the moment, my career is based mostly on art commissions – creating personalised portraits for people who want to immortalise a memory. The eventual goal is to be doing 50% commission work, and 50% my own originals.
One of the biggest learnings for me in becoming a self-employed artist was in fact the business side of things. Yes, I can do the art. But what about the marketing, the selling, getting into galleries, making art prints, generating new customers … pretty much all of this, I’ve had to learn along the way. And of course, there is no learning without a certain amount of mistakes!
Using social media to get my work out there is one of those things that seems easy, but is incredibly mind blowing. Unfortunately, it is also a necessity for me. The algorithms and all that jazz are still far too advanced for me to worry about, but I have learned that being consistent in what time of day and how much I post to my pages really does help in the long run. I now have over 8000 people following me and enjoying my art, which just blows my mind entirely.
There are so many soft pastel artists out there at the moment and it can be incredibly intimidating putting my work out there among all of these amazing artists. I try to remember that the world is wide. No matter how many artists there are, there are enough eyes who would like to see what I do, so I should keep on keeping on.
I’ve started slowly to streamline my weeks to ensure that I have enough time to do everything that I need to do. I had to remind myself the other day that I keep saying that I’m a FULL-TIME artist, but that’s not entirely correct – I only have 30 hours a week without kids, allocated to my art business. So I’m more accurately a part-time artist, full-time Mum!
Monday is my admin day and it is filled with emails, blogs, checking in on bookings, marketing, tracking expenses, taxes and the list goes on. Needless to say, even though I actually get NO drawing done on Mondays, it’s my busiest day of the week!
Tues-Thurs are primarily used for commissions and I try to keep Friday as a day for finishing and/or creating originals. As a commission-based artist, splitting my weeks like this helps me maintain a routine and know exactly how my books are looking.
If you’re an emerging artist, I hope this story fills you with hope! We can never have enough artists in this world so keep on moving!! X
Check out Berny’s work at: www.bbart.co.nz
Words by Bernadette Ballantyne
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