Episode 3: Humility and Patience...but not demure.

Episode 3: Humility and Patience...but not demure.

A discussion of what's on my mind lately as an artist.

Hosted by Adam M Botsford
https://www.kaotixllc.com/
©Kaotix LLC, 2024

Transcript

That Wonderful State:

Intro: “Welcome to That Wonderful State, a podcast about living and working as an artist.”

Episode 3: Humility and Patience

Hello again! Welcome back. 

Thank you everyone who listened in on my interview with Tina. I was very nervous, as some of you who know me well will be able to tell. It’s been a while since I hosted podcast interviews and I felt a bit rusty. I’m really happy with how it turned out and I’ve already created a list of things to work on for next interview. 

Tina was amazing. She was a perfect first interview for the series. I’m really grateful she took the time to talk with me. I have an artist and author lined up for the next one. 

Well down to business. My topics for this episode are humility and patience. Timely given the suddenly surge of the demure and respectful meme. Though honestly, I’m rarely an advocate anyone being demure. 

Why humility?

The two areas I’m noticing it most at the moment are two areas. Cold Calling and New Projects.

Cold Calling – If you’re not familiar with the term cold calling, it comes from jobs in sales where people would reach out to potential customer who hadn’t previous expressed interest. Imagine the old door to door salesperson. The idea is that you’re approaching someone to “sell” something. It may not be a sale in the traditional sense but the act involves you attempting to garner their participation of some kind transaction. For me that looks like messaging people for interviews. Reaching out to people who I don’t know or have only met once or twice to ask them to hop on a call with me and tell me about their career and life. 

It’s hard. It’s intimidating and I feel nervous every single time. 

On paper I have a noteworthy resume. Artistically, I’m skilled and experienced. But I’m still just one of millions of people out there looking to connect with other people to sell something. No one owes me their time. I don’t carry online clout. No one is seeing a message from me in their inbox and thinking “oh, that’s that famous artist” or “…talking to this guy could make me famous”. I felt it when I reached out to Tina about her interview. Here I am, some random guy who she has never actual met and she only knew of from a drawing event we both attended, messaging her online to ask her to have a vulnerable conversation with me. I’m grateful she took me up on it. Generally though…I’ve been left on read a few times, others have replied with varying degrees of interest, and hopefully more will be excited to participate in the future. But I’m leaning into the humility that is so pervasive in art. Put yourself out there and be open to whatever comes your way, even if that’s rejection. 

New Projects / New Clients – Humility is a must here. I’m sure it’s obvious in some ways but it’s so easy to forget. Inevitably with a client you’ll end up on one side of an experience line. You’re either more experienced in a particular topic, or less. 

It’s easy to want to feel like the expert. Sometimes you even get hired on because you are genuinely an expert on a topic. 

In both situation you need to be prepared to act through humility by understanding everyone is learning and that you need to calibrate your approach and communication for each person and project. I do my best to keep it at the forefront of my mind in my work. I try to be open, share my knowledge, and when I feel frustration or impatience I question my reasons first. 

Why Patience?

This is generally an issue I have with my art. Particularly, but not exclusive to, painting. Some of it is just my own impatience with art and creation. Painting existed in this space that I believed required realism. Ironically, realism isn’t even my favorite kind of painting but I had this wall up about how my paintings were never what I expected them to be and in turn, avoided painting for a long time. I’m confronting that now with a series of mini paintings. 

Some of my impatience came directly from years of freelancing. As a freelance artist, quick turn-arounds on your work feel like the best way to get projects and work. If you’re getting paid a flat rates for pieces then the faster you finish it, the better. Particularly for low cost or budget priced pieces. When I was focused on character portraits, mainly tabletop games, this model worked well. For several years this was how I made connections with new clients. If you’re debating using a site like Etsy for character portraits, do it. I literally got a new commission today just before I started writing this from a client I first worked with six years ago. I’ll make it a point to talk about my experiences and the value of holding on to good clients in another episode. 

But for now back to patience…this approach to work created an sense of internal pressure to turn work around quickly. That pressure was reinforced by each sale. A cycle developed in which I believed I had to get work back to clients as fast as possible to get the most value for what I was charging.

The problem is, the pressure didn’t go away even as projects got bigger. I first really noticed it was a problem when I took on a client who was creating a card game. He had this vision that was a year or two out which was so outside of how my mind was use to working. 

While a lot of good practices and efficiencies came from this internalized pressure to be fast, the lack of balance and inability to shift mindsets made transitioning to big projects difficult.  

Here are a few bits of advice and some practical tips for this episode:

1.     This first one is a complete retelling of advice from an interview I did a few years ago with Jason Ertter co-owner of Black Mountain Yarn Shop in North Carolina. His advice was to talk about what you do. As much as you can and to everyone. At first its easy to hear this and think of every random Instagram account I’ve seen talking about how they are “an influencer” or “life coach” but over the past few years it’s started to make more sense. It’s recently been on my mind because I witnessed a similar situation play out while shopping for dog food at my local pet store. Some customer in front of me was talking about how he was trying to sell his business. He was mentioning it to every other local business owner he knew or met to spread the word that his places were going on the market. So I brought it up to the store owner out of curiosity and she talked to me all about how she got started, how she worked up to owning the buildings her places are in, and talked about how she’s expanding to a third storefront. I don’t have any aspirations of owning a pet supply store but suddenly I was emotional invested. I was curious about her approach. I was excited about what she was doing. I wanted to know more and started to immediately wonder about how I could get involved. That’s when it really clicked. Some people want to support other people. Business owners want to encourage other business owners. You won’t be able to find those people if you aren’t open to it.

Let’s all take Jason’s advice and talk about what we are doing. And if any of you have advice about how that could look, please let me know. I genuinely would love to get your input. So far my efforts have been focused on talking to other artists, here, and at local drawing events. I’m trying to talk about it more on social media but to be candid, I don’t really feel like I know what I’m doing. Nonetheless, it’s good practice. Every time I put myself out there, I learn a bit about how best to describe what I do and my approach. 

2.     The second is slow down and be thorough. The most powerful client connections I’ve made did not come from the speed at which I completed work, it was from the consistency of my work and communication. Make good art. Stay on top of your emails and deadlines. If you’re an incredible artist who can’t get back to people or meet a deadline, you’ll likely spend more time hunting for new clients than actually working. Be honest about how long your work takes and commit to those timelines. There is no wrong speed for producing work, but promising quick turn-arounds and then bargaining for more time later will discourage quality clients. But so will producing low quality work with fast turn arounds. Clear and honest expectations are a must across the board.

3.     Tips for artists that work with books. It’s a jump in focus but I want to share specific tools or websites whenever I can. Right now I’m talking a lot with a Washington author and artist, Juliette Ricci Lagman, who is preparing to launch her latest book next month. We’ve been talking about ways to find and query book agents. So for those curious, check out these websites: 

Querytracker.net and Querymanager.com 

Querytracker can help you find agents and agencies. It will also tell you who is accepting submissions and often give you information about how to get your submission to them.

Querymanager works along side the first website to help you submit the actual query.

And if it helps, publishing has it’s own jargon and querying is just the term for reaching out to see if an agent would be interested in trying to help you sell your book. A submission is typically the work you’re trying to sell or publish such as a manuscript. 

Well, those are my big topics for the day. Keep an eye out for the next interview coming next week and please reach out if you have any questions or suggestions.

I’ll put some contact options in the podcast description.

Thanks for listening and thanks for being amazing!