Think creatively about artistic challenges if you want to do one this year. Create your own. This collage is from an article by Anke Humpert in The Polymer Arts Winter 2014 – Boundaries issue. 15 artists created a piece based on a voted on set of limitations – an organically inspired pendant with a 3 color palette. The real challenge came when, after finishing their pieces, she asked them to make the same piece again to see what they would change. Could limitations or repeating your creations be the kind of thing to gain the skill and growth you are after this year?

Here we are, looking out towards a new year, and the most common question people probably have is some version of, “What do I do different this year?” This may manifest as a list of resolutions or a new art business plans or just a verbal pronouncement of productive intentions that only the cat will hear (and will actively work to thwart too, so maybe don’t tell the cat. The dogs, though, they got your back!) There is just something about a new year that begs for a new start, or new restart, but there is a question you should ask yourself first—are you ready to set goals and challenges for yourself right now?

There is definitely something motivating about joining so many others in committing to New Year’s resolutions, but they need to be the right resolutions for the right reasons and either this needs to be the right time or you need to be realistic about when you can start.

Where Your Motivation Comes from

One of the biggest problems with New Year’s resolutions, and the reason so many of them fail, is that most people set goals that are motivated by something external, such as the opinion or expectation of spouses, parents, or friends, or they are ideas that come from the culture or society we are entrenched in. Doing something that is simply expected of you versus it being something that you are personally driven to do makes a huge difference in being able to accomplish the goal and to have it be the fulfilling and helpful change in your life that you hope it to be. So, if your goals are not something internally motivated, something that comes from a core source of desire or inquisitiveness, it’s going to be very hard to make them a priority and to get through every step required.

Determining if something is internally or externally motivated, however, can be very difficult. External expectations and our desires are often so intertwined or so bred into us that it is hard to tell the difference. But there are a couple questions you can ask yourself about any goal you want to set that can be helpful in this regard:

Would I still want to go after this goal if no one else knew or had the opportunity to approve the results?

Do I feel excited, physically, and emotionally, at the idea of working on and achieving this goal?

If you can say yes to both these questions, then you can be more certain that this is a goal important to you personally which means you’re more likely to be successful at it. I know the first question won’t always make a lot of sense for some goals such as “I want to make more time for my spouse,” or “I want to get my art into 4 galleries this year.” Reaching either of those goals would be noticed and commented on but just imagine that no one gave you supportive commentary in connection to those goals. Would you still do them?

Artistic challenges are popular New Year’s resolution that helps get people focused and productive in the studio. If you’re thinking of doing a challenge but maybe on the fence about it, ask those two questions. For instance, if you make a goal to create one pair of earrings each week this year, ones that you never post and no one will ever see, would you still do it? If the only thing that motivates you is the thought of the comments and hearts you will receive when you post them on social media, you may not be going after that goal for sustainable reasons and it could even inhibit your artistic growth if, for instance you change your focus from jewelry to wall art midyear – you may feel inclined to complete the challenge even if your heart isn’t in it.

The Question of Timing?

Also remember that you don’t have to jump on your goals on January 1st. Maybe take a week or a month to recover from the holidays and get yourself into a good position to take on your goals and resolutions. You can write down those goals, give yourself a realistic start date, and put that on your calendar, as an alarm on your phone, and tell at least 3 people about it. You’re sure to start it as planned that way but you won’t have to get crazy with it on day one of 2020.

You also need to be realistic. Can you really do one pair of earrings a week along with everything else that you plan to do and that life demands of you in the coming months, not to mentionthe entire year? Maybe it would be better to create a pair every other week or once a monthor maybe after you catch your breath from the holidays a bit at least. Or you might simply set aside one hour each week to work on a challenge but don’t scold yourself if you don’t create a pair of earrings in an hour or if you want to change the challenge to something else. You can simply put in the work for that hour and see where it takes you.

Embracing the Best of Teachers: Failure

I also think resolutions are hard because of the way people look at failure. If you gave yourself a weekly challenge and then didn’t hit it one week, the fact that you didn’t meet the challenge perfectly can make you feel that the rest of the challenge is pointless. However, not meeting a single small step toward your goal does not cancel out the value of what you’re trying to do as a whole. You aren’t doing it just to be successful every single step of the way, are you? Its a journey not a test. You don’t lose points if you mess up here and there. In fact, the more you trip up, the more you’ll learn so, really, failure is like getting extra credit.

Keep focused on why you decided to go after this goal to keep “failures” from getting you down. If you are doing it to learn, explore, or stretch yourself, then the occasional failure should be expected and welcome as opportunities (yeah, I cringe at that over-used corporate term too but it’s also true) to assess why it happened and find better and easier ways to do it well. Failure is where most of our change and growth happens.

Determine the Why

The one piece of week, or month or day challenges give you easy guidelines but keep in mind they may not be the thing that you need to be spending your time and energy on. I would suggest that you start with an end goal and then determine what kind of challenge or process you should go through to accomplish that. End goals are not “I want to make 52 earrings this year.” That’s the work you do to reach your goal, but your end goal is what you get out of going through that process.

Let’s be honest – you are not going to make 52 earrings unless all that work is going to do something beyond having a growing stack of earrings. Yes, possibly, it’s going to give you a huge portfolio of earrings that you can take to specific gallery or show to get in there and sell them. If that’s the case, your end goal looks to be about increasing your sales through a specific venue, or to have the stock necessary to get you in so you can gain the recognition that being in that gallery or show would bring, thus helping you grow your art business. Do you see how the process and your end goal are different?

Decide what you want and work back from there. Create a challenge as unique and specific as you need it to be for what you are trying to accomplish. That might sound like a tall order, but stick with me this coming month on the blog and with the new Virtual Art Box  project and I’ll help you figure that out. A major part of the Box project is to help you create challenges that makes sense for where you want to go creatively and why you create as well as providing you with a community of artists all in the same boat, with myself and other contributing artists to help guide you and coach you along the way.

For the month of January, the blog will be filled with art and ideas around challenging yourself as a kind of nudge to get you thinking about what you want to accomplish, improve, or explore this coming year. You can make your first goal to determine what it is that you yourself truly want to accomplish. That’s an important first step that will ease you into the new year and give you time to find the right challenge, if any, that you need.

I’m in This With You!

Okay … I know I said I would keep these short over the holiday weekends, but I have a lot to say on this subject and I am contemplating this all myself. What do I want to accomplish for myself in the year and months coming up, in my art, my business, and my writing? Also, what about my work-life balance and my health? I can’t work on those all at once so part of figuring out what I might want to set a goal for will be prioritizing. My inherent challenge, no matter what goals I might come up with, will be checking my workload to stay well while doing the “smart” things needed to keep a business growing. I do really want to create more and write more fiction but recognizing and working within my limitations are huge. I know that’s probably a goal for quite a few of us enthusiastic creatives. We just have too many ideas. We can make that a kind of umbrella goal though, to keep checking in our commitments and be open to changing them as needed.

So, how about this to start us out: Just be kind to yourself, be your number one priority so you have the energy to help others, say no to doing things that don’t feed your heart and soul, and give yourself permission to relax and enjoy the moment.

I, myself, am starting there.

And with that, I want to wish every single one of you a very joyous, inspiring, and wonderous new year!

Laurie Mika, Tree of Life. www.mikaarts.com

When do the holidays kick in for you? For me and my Southern California family, it started yesterday and, because we give a nod and due respect to several different holidays and beliefs, we’ll have important days and gatherings for the next week and a half. And I think all of them, religious and not, are beautiful and moving. Some here are simply using the time off to be with family and friends, others to rejoice in their passion for Christ, still others celebrate the Jewish liberation from oppression, and others still drum up the sun on the shortest day of the year for the winter solstice or Yule. And they all fall within the same week this year!

Not everybody feels the need to be strictly spiritual but its week’s like this that make me appreciate the variety and possibilities. The range of spiritual beliefs and how we celebrate them feels very much like art. Particular religions, personal levels of spirituality, or faith only in science gives us all so many canvases upon which to create ourselves, enabling beliefs and expressions of those philosophies in very individual ways.

I’m particularly happy about the holidays that come with so many of these beliefs as they give us a chance to assess what is important in our lives, to stop the merry-go-round that we’re on for a moment and really look at ourselves, what we’re doing, and who we are surrounded by. A lot of this gets lost in the craziness of this season’s shopping, parties, and travel, but I hope you all have time to look to what’s most important – the people you share your life with.

You, my readers, are part of that for me, out there as a large, extended creative family that listens to my babbling and writes, more often than expected, to relate and relay your own stories, to cheer me on, and to simply be a friend.

I just want to take a moment to say thank you and to let you know how much I appreciate and adore you for your creativity and passion, and especially for letting me express mine through things like this blog.

It’s hard to find art work that encompasses all we might be celebrating this week but, I think, to open this post, a Tree of Life comes pretty close and who doesn’t love to just get lost in the details of a Laurie Mika mosaic?

Speaking of mosaics, I took a day at the end of the week to finally grout the kitchen backsplash. There will be too many gatherings at the house to leave that undone! I still need to get back to the polymer pieces that will go on the magnets in the glass mosaic but we have an otherwise finished wall,  finally! Here is quick pick of it.

And with that I am off to enjoy the Yuletide today with some sugar free wassail (basically just ginger tea for me … *sigh*) and the first night of Hanukkah. All this is to commence with a house full of college kids (girls and boys) who will be doing something a bit different … knitting and drinking tea. Yep. Their idea, not ours. Nothing welcomes winter like freshly knitted scarves and hot tea apparently. I think its wonderful!

Here’s to all your wonderful and wacky traditions! All the best this holiday week to you and yours!

Do you consider yourself an artist, an artisan, or a hobbyist when it comes to your creative work? You might remember a similar question being asked on the recent survey we sent out (and for the curious, I’ll reveal some of the results at the end of this post.) Does the question make you stop and consider how you see yourself or maybe what those terms actually mean? Or did you answer that question without hesitation? Personally, I really dislike labels, but they are necessary for us to group and categorize the many people we meet and learn about. Our brains simply can’t file everybody in their own little space in our heads. It would be like throwing all your beads in a bucket and then hoping you can find the one you want when you need it. So, we have labels for others as well as ourselves. The label for ourselves gives us a way to identify our “tribe” – those people that approach their life or work in a similar fashion or think or see the world in a similar way.

Of course, to group ourselves with others we have to have a common definition, but definitions related to creative and skilled practices can be so extremely vague and wide ranging. This is, in part, due to the history of the concept of art and artists themselves. Did you know that the idea of an artist as a respected individual with skill and expressive intention was not a solidified concept until the early 19th century? Early on, among the ancient Greeks for instance, people who created in what we now think of as the fine arts, such as sculpture and painting, were often thought of as lowly craftspeople, not much better than slaves. The word “artist” didn’t even exist.

Even after the word “artist” came into use in various parts of the world (circa 1507), it only helped to define those crafters that were highly skilled. That which was called art was not produced as a product of self-expression but was largely created in the service of organized religion or government, quite frequently as a kind of propaganda. Art as a form of expression, an extension of the creator’s unique view of the world, and created for its own sake, was not a well-formed concept until early in the 19^th century. That’s a mere 200 years ago! How crazy is that?

Nowadays, we play with the idea about what makes one an artist. I am all for including the requirement that it is an act of unique and intentional personal expression but, as most people proclaim, it’s really up to the individual as to whether they want to call himself an artist or not. However, I don’t think one has to have a certain level of skill or experience, they don’t have to sell their work, or have the value of what they do be confirmed by others. When it comes down to it, I think the only thing that matters is that an artist is willing to put a bit of themselves out into the world, bare their soul some, and share themselves with others.

Because art involves a bit of personal vulnerability, it does take an immense amount of bravery to keep producing, growing, and discovering. Even if you don’t show your work to others, isn’t it a tiny bit scary to sit down and work on something new, not knowing if you’ll create something you find successful? We don’t like to fail, even when we are the only ones judging it, but trying (and failing sometimes, maybe a lot of the time) is the only way we can get to the point of creating something truly satisfying and accomplished.

But even then, even when we create the most magnificent thing we can imagine, we will want to keep at it, to try something new even if just to tweak our best successes, and that takes more brave exploration. I think that being an artist is, in large part, about constantly striving, and regularly failing, but calling up the courage to keep trying regardless.

Why do we put ourselves through such torture though? Because when we create something wonderful, that is uniquely our own, there is just no better feeling in all the world. And you know, those times you don’t succeed are really what makes the successes so intensely satisfying. We just can’t fully appreciate the highs without experiencing the lows. It’s the contrast between them that makes it feel so good when we get it right!

So, this week I wanted to share with you the work of just a few people who are really putting themselves out there, looking honestly at themselves and their work, even though it’s scary. Being brave doesn’t mean that you’re not afraid. Being brave means you do it even though you are afraid.

Brave Artistic Souls

There are several Facebook groups that invite and encourage crafters and artists to share their work and ask questions. It was in one of these groups that I saw this beaded pendant from Amy Jamroz posted with a note about this being part of her quest to create work that she really enjoys making. She was very honest about her fear of moving forward with these new changes. It’s hard enough to try pushing yourself in a new direction but it has to be more nerve-wracking to share it.

First, I want to applaud Amy for posting in the “Polymer Clay Success” group about her journey and her fears. Just that inclination shows a tremendous amount of dedication to her work and herself as an artist. You can definitely see the joy and confidence in what she’s doing now in the color choices and the skills she’s gained with her dedicated focus.

Israel’s Yudit Yitzhaki was one of those brave folks who sent me links of her work directly. I do get this a lot but, to be honest, most of the time, it is from people quite new to the material, people who really need to invest in their work a bit more by putting time into honing their skills and finding their own beautiful and unique voice. It can be quite a long and bumpy road, and I do know how enthusiastic one can be when the polymer addiction first sets it, but we all need to take the time and invest in our creative self before putting new work out there. Remember … the internet never forgets so you want what you post, or ask others to share, to be something you believe you will be happy to have others see a decade from now. Don’t rush it. The thing is, once someone’s skill and voice have come into their own, chances are that others, upon recognizing a unique and passionate voice, will do the sharing and promoting of the work for them.

The work Yudit sent me was obviously already there but I think coming from a non-English speaking country, it was harder to break into the very active English sector of our community. So, sending her work to me and others was a good idea. She has such brave and bright sense of color and her obvious love of the world around her where she lives in Israel, just jumps from the work.

Back before EvaMarie Törnström made such a tremendous breakthrough in her art, I had an email conversation with her about her Malta horse, seen below, which I also blogged about in January of 2015. My then assistant, Paula Gilbert, championed her work for consideration for the magazine but I was hesitant to do so, not because I didn’t think it had merit but because I felt like her previous work was not quite there but the Malta horse was amazing and I wanted to hold out a bit and see where she was going with that.

I wrote her to express my thoughts and yes, she was thinking about heading in a new and exciting direction and within a year she came out with some of the most expressive animals sculptures I’d ever seen. I could tell from our email conversation that she had been a little uncertain about the new direction although I wasn’t sure why, but she did the work and really let her own voice shine and the response to her new sculptures was so very enthusiastic. I am so glad that I listened to my gut and waited to feature her a year later when we could show her very emotive horse sculptures, like the piece this post opened up with, that she is so well known for now.

Now, is there something you have been hesitant to try or a new direction in your work you’ve wanted to explore or maybe a change in your art business that gets you excited? If so, why haven’t you started down that road?

Sometimes we are fearful for good reason and that emotion always warrants a bit of consideration before jumping in but if you feel driven to do it, don’t let the fear hold you back. We have to take some risks to make progress. I find it helps to ask, “What is the worse that can happen?” Usually the worst thing that can happen is that you temporarily fail but can readily get up and try again. You’ll learn more through your failures than through your successes so be open to the learning and go for it!

Thanks for the Survey!

Thank you to everyone that completed our Reader’s surveys. I LOVE to hear what you have to say. Nearly 400 people responded, and a lot of you left custom suggestions which I am still going through, so I’ll need more time for that. However, there were a few interesting results. So, here is a rundown for those of you who are into statistics or are curious about your fellow readers here.

I have had the sneaking suspicion for a while that my readership was no longer just polymer artists and sure enough, 1 out of every 4 readers that answered the survey did NOT identify polymer as their primary medium and half of those folks didn’t even consider polymer as their second medium. That was a surprise but a happy one for me as I do hope what I write, here especially, appeals to a broad range of crafters.

Also surprising was that only 7% of survey respondents said they work exclusively with polymer while the majority worked in a mix of polymer plus another medium, most commonly beads, mixed media, and metal. And the most surprising statistic, for me, was that only 58% identified jewelry as their primary art form. I thought it’d be a lot more! Tons of readers said they worked primarily in home décor, wall art, and sculpture. So, okay … I seem to be speaking to a wide range of artists and crafters here and I am sure glad to do so.

Remember the opening question of this post …. Well, 55% of survey respondents identified as artists, either part-time or professional, which I was glad to see since I think in terms of what artists would want or need when I write these blogs. The vast majority of the other 45% said they were avid hobbyists and much of the design and aesthetic talk is good for those folks as well!

When it came to content, I was rather surprised but encouraged that only about 1/3 of the survey folks thought project tutorials were a must have in what I post and publish. That has not been the case in past surveys where half the respondents were clamoring for them. Is there a shift in the community or in my readership? It’s hard to say.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I push for people to find their own voice and although project tutorials are a fabulous way to hone one’s skills, it really looks like you all are clamoring to learn  more about design, with a good 40% saying that’s a “Must Have”, another 40% saying they looked forward to that kind of thing and absolutely no one saying they didn’t want that kind of information. That was the only category of content preferences that didn’t have anyone say they weren’t interested in it and it had the highest level of interest although learning about other mediums came in a close second. I just love where your focus is, all you beautiful readers!

The only other thing I thought was of particular interest was how many people pay for digital media such as blogs, Patreon accounts, and membership sites. It looks like almost ¼ of you do, even with all the free stuff out there. That is wonderfully supportive of your fellow artists who put together digital online content. It looks like that goes up to about half if you if we include downloadable PDFs and videos. Of course, the majority of people put their money into books and magazines. After all, this is the readership of Tenth Muse publishing but it good to know a lot of you are open to other options that can monetarily support what I do!

I doubt it would be a surprise to you all to hear that over 85% of the folks on the survey access publications and online sources primarily to improve their skills. So, no matter what I do, I will endeavor to help you do that, but I am really going to have to think on what these results mean and how I can help you all get the content you need and want.

As for the drawing winner … Congrats to Judy Santini who is $50 richer! And tons of people are richer in information for taking advantage of the 15% off coupon! If you answered the survey but didn’t get to use that discount yet, give me a few days to get a mailing list together to resend you the code and a reminder.

On the Road

On that note, I need to ask for a pardon as next week’s blog will not be quite the same as I have been doing. Getting internet access during all this traveling, as well as free time while visiting family and taking care of other business, has been trying. I will get you something next week but as you see in this one, there’s not as many examples and I don’t know what I will be able to pull off this coming week as I help my sister get ready for her wedding. On top of that, Christi Friesen and Debbie Crothers will drop into Denver in the midst of that so free moments will be spent sneaking off to commune with my like minding polymer pals. But if you are in Denver next weekend, look into the classes Debbie is teaching at the Great Create. I will try and drop by on Saturday to say hello there as well and maybe I can at least share some photos with you next weekend.

Ok, my design minded, skill honing, courageous creatives. Go forth and conquers those fears and create bravely this week!

Where does the inspiration for the colors you use come from? I think more than a few of us simply have our favorite colors and keep returning to them while a good handful make a conscious effort every year or even every season to come up with a new palette or variation on an old palette to work with. But regardless of our usual approach, we are, constantly getting input on color. We differ in how we process it and whether it affects our tastes and, more to the point here, how it might affect our color choices in our artwork.

Color constantly changes in our surrounding world, most commonly in goods like clothing and cars and such. There are even announcements about the upcoming colors of the season and articles on color trends. These can be useful if your market is sensitive to these changes, but it won’t necessarily feed your personal color cravings. I myself am quite aware that I lean towards a very autumnal inspired palette. Well, lean is a bit too soft a word … I cling to it like a shy child with a favorite worn out blanket! I have to constantly push myself to broaden my palette not because my choices are bad or are getting stale but because if I don’t, I won’t know what I might be missing out on.

However, right now I get to have my fill of my favorites as I glory in the fall colors of the Western United States. I headed out a couple days ago on a 3-week trip that will be primarily rooted in Colorado, starting my trek with a drive across the deserts of the west and into the quickly changing foliage of the Rocky Mountains. There are so many colors out there in the wide-open spaces and the majesty of the mountains this time of year. The yellow of the aspens leaves me in awe but I rarely work with it. This trip may inspire me to do so!

I thought we’d take a casual Sunday stroll through what others are doing with their colors palettes these days and see if any don’t inspire you to play with something new.

A Trip Over the Rainbow

Let’s start with Liska Flower, whose work graces the start of this blog above, as I can segue from last week’s visual movement to color. Because, wow, this has so much visual movement! Remember me saying curved lines are an easy way to create a feel of movement and energy? Well, she has that here in every corner of the piece. It creates its own dense texture too but for all the busyness, it’s not overwhelming as the colors are all slightly lightened from their full saturated hue, giving the wall piece a rather easy going feeling. The heavy use of blue and the idea of looking at an ocean helps that too. The little creature poking out from the waves and ripples give focal points for your eye to rest on so you don’t get lost in the swirling texture and, aside from those design notes, the little signs of life are so cute! Cuteness should be made an official design element, I just decided.

Angela Barenholtz has a great sense of color and can get quite wild with it but always in a way that feels intentional and controlled instead of chaotic. She’s also gotten into creating “paintings” with chopped raw polymer recently, reproducing images from other artists with her own interpretation. I’m not sure if these are just color studies or practice with the techniques but I am hoping we’ll get to see original images soon too! This one is from a 1970 album cover for Derek and the Dominoes. I put the original in so you can she how far she ran with it color wise.

Irina Akulina definitely leans towards high contrast in her color choices but otherwise the whole rainbow is up for grabs in her studio. Being in Denver, I’m seeing a lot of orange and blue due to the hugely popular Broncos football team here but nothing quite so gorgeous as this combination with the slightly tinted and varied orange and the blue leaning towards teal. Taking your color a little off from the primaries and secondaries or pushing them to be a little muted (easily done with a pinch of contrasting color, black, or white mixed in) can result in such elegant combinations.

I think Laura Tabakman and I are similarly enchanted by the dark, rich colors that dominate fall. Here is a set of leaf brooches she made this past summer, perhaps in preparation for the new Into the Forest exhibit in Atlantic City New Jersey. If you are anywhere nearby while this is up, you have to go. So much great polymer work in one place! Its mind boggling.

The dramatic color choices of this recent piece by Christine K. Harris just stopped me in my tracks. I am used to seeing muted tones with drama in the use of reds but this is really striking. Blue is usually a color of calm and control but this dream inspired piece is not really either of those and yet, it works, perhaps because the blue grounds it a bit, making it more magnificent than frightening.

I find it interesting that it started, color wise, here.

So, how about you? Do you tend towards one color palette or do you change it up with the ebb and flow of trends? Are you ever just driven to recreate the colors you see out in the world or do you primarily work from packaged colors? There is no right or wrong way to choose the colors you work with but if you haven’t changed it in a while or are feeling like you’re in a rut, take a look around and let yourself be inspired by the incidental color you run into

Survey and Cash Drawing Reminder

Today is the last day to be heard and to get in on the drawing for participants of our latest Reader’s survey. If you haven’t already, would you give me just 2-3 minutes to fill out this survey? Not only does it help us help you get the information you want and need, but survey respondents will get a 15% off coupon for your entire cart on our website and a chance to win $50 cash! Who couldn’t use a few extra bucks, hmm?

Look for the 15% off code on the page that comes up after submitting the survey and write it down. Its good through the end of October. The drawing for our one $50 cash prize winner will be done tomorrow night, Monday the 30th.

Here, let me bring you along on my travels. These are a few pics from my drive yesterday–views right off the I-70 highway. Hoping I have a couple days to go see the interior between a couple weddings and family and friend visits. The color changing here is mostly yellows but there are swathes of deep red brush that are mindblowing but you have to dive farther into the mountains in for those. I have been quite a few places throughout the world but I still find Colorado to be one of the most beautiful spots on earth. Put it on your bucket list if you’ve not yet visited!

Ok, I need to go get some sleep. Road weary and dealing with the elevation gain has made me quite sleepy! I hope I caught all the typos and wonky grammar but if not, please forgive me!

I hope you’ve had a beautiful weekend and have yourself a colorful week!