Failing as a Full Time Creative

It’s OK not to be a full time creative. It’s OK not to earn a living from your artwork. It’s OK if your creativity doesn’t pay the bills. Of course it's great if it does, but is that really the point?

I would love to make a living from my creativity.

But what does that actually mean?

In my imagination, I sit at my desk in my studio on weekdays drawing and writing. My fairy lights are on, Ludovico Einaudi plays in the background and my favourite wax melt perfumes the air. The dogs snooze on the sofa dreaming their doggy dreams while I work. At lunchtime, we go for long walks down the lane and through the woods.

Some days I visit a coffee shop where I sit quietly in the corner and write or draw and people watch, while sipping a latte and nibbling a blueberry muffin.

I earn enough from my work for our family to thrive and I sleep peacefully each night unassailed by financial concerns.

Of course earning a good living through our creativity is achievable and days like that are possible. I had days like it, but it’s probably not realistic to believe that every day will be a panacea of peace and calm.

There are plenty of real-life creative professionals who may well get days that match my dream, but it is still a job, which requires work, responsibility, obligation, schedules and deadlines, structure and organisation.

And admin. Lots of admin.

All of which my creativity has recently completely rebelled against.

Please allow me to explain.

Surrounded by creativity

My memories of childhood are full of creativity. I played the clarinet and the flute. My sister and I created things with play dough, with plasticine, with clay. We messed about with papier mache, we made models from matchsticks, we sewed our own clothes and clothes for our toys. We knitted and crocheted, we drew, painted, pressed flowers and made things of all kinds.

As I grew up, I was surrounded by creativity. My granddad was a photographer and had a dark room in his shed in the back garden. My dad took up woodcarving and furniture making as a hobby after he became ill and was unable to work. My mum knitted and sewed.

My sister, my nieces and my aunties are creative and collectors of creativity; painting watercolours, crafting with felt, knitting and crocheting, creating intricate models from polymer clay, collecting unique and beautiful pieces of artwork to fill their homes.

But there was never a point in my childhood or as I grew up, left home and moved away, that the purpose of any of that creativity was about making a living from it.

Creative escape

Through my twenties and thirties, my creativity was my escape, it was about having fun, trying new things and relaxing, while I grafted to qualify as an accountant and develop my career in finance.

It wasn’t until I turned forty that I started to wonder whether my creativity could be more than a hobby. And then there was the small matter of a global pandemic, which turned the world upside down and me along with it.

So with commissions coming in regularly, a large project on the horizon and a small amount of money saved, I resigned from my corporate career and steady salary and set out to earn a living from my creativity.

Making a living as a creative

But I couldn’t decide which bit of my creativity I wanted to pursue. Did I want to be a muralist? Did I want to draw business illustrations or be a pet portrait artist? Did I want to sell my work at craft markets or draw private commissions and personalised illustrations? Did I want to illustrate children’s picture books? My answer was YES, oh yes, and that, yes please, can I do that too? I flitted between different things, saying yes to pretty much everything that came my way and daydreaming of even more.

But somehow, over time, drawing to earn a living, creating for other people, taking other peoples words, moments, messages, inspiration and ideas and turning them into pictures started to feel more and more mundane. Like a job. It was a job I enjoyed, but the magic slipped way, lost in the admin of running a business, dissipating through another set of revisions, another website update, another deadline, another obligation.

And it didn’t last. Things slowed down, commissions stopped coming in regularly. I started losing sleep worrying how I would pay the bills.

Failing to make a living as a creative

The final straw came when a big project fell through and my dream of being a full-time creative abruptly ended.

Perhaps it was the global recession that followed the global pandemic. Perhaps I was deluded thinking that I could sustain the same earnings as my senior corporate role. Maybe I was charging too much or perhaps it was my inability to settle down and choose a single artistic discipline to pursue. Perhaps I didn’t post often enough or consistently enough on social media.

Maybe I didn’t work hard enough.

For a long time, I felt like my heart was broken. I had failed.

I returned to an employed role working in finance. I told myself I was lucky to have a qualification and 20 years experience to fall back on. Even though I’d worked hard to achieve it. But still I dreamed.

I continued to take commissions when they came my way, working evenings and weekends to keep the dream alive. Hoping to find a way to escape back into that daydream, but the magic was lost. The enchantment remained only in the illustrations I drew for myself and for friends, in the exploration of creativity for the sake of creativity alone, and not as a means to earn a living.

I learned that putting burdens and constraints on my creativity, setting deadlines and attempting the traditional marketing methods to sell my work, only served to chase away my creativity and inspiration.

Shakespeare said, “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work”. For a very long time, I didn’t agree. But now, I’m starting to think he might have been onto something…..

Of course I would love to have a successful career as a full time creative.

But I have learned that my inner creativity is fragile and precious. I want to nurture and protect it, I don’t want to destroy it with responsibility and overwhelm it with obligation. I don’t want my creativity to feel like my job. I don’t want to feel the shoulds and the musts and the pressure and the competition and the comparisons. I want it to feel like freedom and release and endless and boundless opportunities and ideas and inspiration unfettered.

What is the point?

I am illustrating a children’s picture book written by my friend

Lydia Saward

. But I’m not a picture book illustrator and I don’t think I want to be. We’re publishing a book, yes and of course we want it to be wildly popular and successful, but that’s not the point. We are bringing to life a magical world full of mischief and mayhem, joy and fun.

That is the point.

I have an online shop full of things that I have designed; hoodies and greetings cards and prints and cushions and mugs. Of course I want them to sell, but I’m not a product designer and I don’t think I want to be. I designed them because I wanted to fill my life and my home with beauty and creativity.

That was the point.

I write about things that I draw and I draw to accompany things that I write and I share my pictures with paid subscribers in my ever growing illustration gallery. And of course I would love my paid community to continue to grow and for that to be enough to pay the bills. But again, that’s not the point. I draw and write and create because it lights my soul and makes my heart sing and I get to fill my own letters with illustrations and delight in seeing others use them too.

That is the point.

I have the first delicate seedlings of a beguiling story growing in my mind, a story of magic and enchantment that I am tentatively enticing out of my imagination and into my notebook. And of course I would love to publish a best selling novel and for it to be adored by the world. But that’s not the point.

The point is. Just because, creativity.

So for now, my accounting job will pay the bills. And each time someone buys something from my online shop and each subscriber here grants my creativity another moment of freedom, unfettered by obligation and responsibility.

Bye for now,

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