Hello fellow Artists, Makers, and Creators!
Every day, week, month, and new year I look for ways to explore and grow my craft. My techniques, understanding, delivery and efficiency in my art and business are constantly between a watering stage for growth and a pruning state of criticism and critiquing as I try to figure out what works and what does not work. I have reached a number of goals these last couple years not only with my jewelry creations, but also in my educational content on Youtube, as well as, my general know how when it comes to running my business online and offline.
As a creative, I'm sure you know all to well that everything you do is a work in progress. And even though stage one, two, or three may not be perfect you continue pushing forward exploring more and more. And through your forward movement, stages one, two and three seem to somewhat just perfect themselves on their own.
This is how I have approach, or I at least strive to approach my art and my goals. As a former ballroom dance teacher, I spent a lot of time encouraging my students to continue moving forward through the syllabus and exploring multiple dances. Some personalities like to strategizes, and they try and stick to one thing and perfect it completely before moving on to the next thing. The thing is, in learning to ballroom dance and anything else, you'll never be able to reach perfection (what is perfection anyway? A topic for another time.) ....you'll never be able to reach perfection on level 1 without the lessons and challenges that come from the steps and techniques learned later on in the syllabus. I can't tell you how many times I had new students approach me and tell me their own strategy for learning how to dance. "well, I don't want to continue moving forward until I feel absolutely confident in this one step, or style of dance." First thing I would do is hide my enlarged ego that wanted to snarkily say "because you're the expert here?" And instead show some compassion for the student's desires, and realize that in order to have a student and a follower, a certain amount of trust must be built. And the only real convincing way to gain their trust is to gently lead them forward so that at the end of the tunnel they see you have, in fact, not lead them astray, and your strategy proved more effective than theirs would have. You have also likely spared them from death by boredom and quitting. They may never know that :)
This lesson I learned in teaching has now and will always accompany me in any of my pursuits. In your artwork, your business, your relationships, any and all goals, you must move forward! One of the ways I'm moving forward this year is by opening a patreon page. If you are not familiar with patreon, it is a membership platform that allows patrons to pledge monthly financial support to artists, educators and online content creators and in exchange patrons help the creator continue making his or her content and depending on the creator they may offer exclusive content, patron only livestreams or...whatever!
Patreon for me was a goal that I set awhile ago, but I felt a few things needed to be in place before this happened. Are all my foundational projects leading up to patreon perfect? Absolutely not. But I will tell you, my mindset, creative ideas, and quality has already climbed to the next level now that I have made promises to my new patrons.
So I suppose this blog is half inspirational and half shameless self promotion. I hope you continue striving and challenging yourself. Your full potential lies beyond the basic steps.
I've left some deets for my patreon page below- please consider becoming a patron and joining our creative community.
Click here!
Member Benefits!
All new and existing members will receive a free download of my first ever PDF tutorial and my newest design in 2021! My PDF tutorials will eventually be available for purchase, but patrons will receive early access and this one is Fa Fa Fa FREEEE.
Members will also receive access to a private facebook group where we can share, discuss, and learn from one another. I will also offer exclusive livestreams to connect better with my patrons.
Design it studio will be a collaboration project that I assign each month on one of my Youtube livestreams. Anyone watching can participate, but only patrons will be able to share a photo of their creations via the facebook group.
Stay Adventurous everyone and keep creating!
Kelley