Create a System That Fits Your Life: Take A Page from Kim Smith's Playbook
When you’re first beginning to learn to paint, it can be hard to know where to start. Oil painter, Kim Smith (Ep. 13) looked at the space she could commit to art and began there.
But let’s back up for a minute to meet the artist.
Smith has always loved art.
“I've been an artist since I can remember,” she says.
She went to school for graphic design. At the time, she didn’t even realize that fine art was a career someone could pursue. As a successful graphic designer, (she’s run her own design and advertising firm for 30 years) she noticed the turn toward digital. She missed painting.
She turned to painting as a hobby. She didn’t make some complicated plan to become a successful artist.
“When I started doing it, it was more of a commitment that I wanted to make to myself to take time for myself than it was really to have it become part of my life that it's become,” says Smith. “It could have been working out. It could have been anything.”
But she missed art. And so, lucky for us, she chose art.
Smith began learning to paint in oils. She looked at her life and thought about where and how art could be a part of it. She was very aware of the time and space she had in her life for painting and she created a system that worked within those confines.
Would she love to try plein air painting? Sure! But that doesn’t fit in the hour she has before work.
Would she love to paint from life? You betcha! But that creates more steps that she’d have to get through in her limited time.
She created a system that allowed her to show up each and every day and finish a painting. And that meant that she knew there were subjects and ways of painting that wouldn’t work for her with those limitations.
“I wake up in the morning and I feel inspired by a color or a visual or something, I just go into my library, and I pick something out and I paint.” - Kim Smith
She began daily painting. She began honing her skills (she is self-taught in oils) and also honing the system she needed to set up to be able to paint each and every day.
But it still starts with inspiration.
“I wake up in the morning and I feel inspired by a color or a visual or something, I just go into my library, and I pick something out and I paint.”
Smith tries to not let herself get caught up in the why of what she’s painting. Her goal is to be pulled by what inspires her and then get into paint as quickly as possible.
“I just create and that works because I'm learning the process of it. I'm learning all the way along and my style is developing, but I'm not belaboring myself with what's the perfect thing to do.”
Smith has a large photo reference library that she’s spent years building. So now it’s a piece that she doesn’t have to overthink.
There are other places she’s made it so she doesn’t have to overthink:
Studio: She has a dedicated place where everything is set up to work. Her easel. Her palette. Everything. She can walk in and get to work.
“I just create and that works because I'm learning the process of it. I'm learning all the way along and my style is developing, but I'm not belaboring myself with what's the perfect thing to do.” -Kim Smith
Palette: She does lay out her paints each day but she has a known set of colors she uses.
At night, after work, she comes home and cleans her brushes to get ready for the next day. That way, she can again just walk into her studio and get to work.
“It's kind of like a meditation to me,” says Smith. “I go to my studio and nothing else matters except what I'm creating. And then when eight o'clock rolls around, it's time to get ready for work. I find my mind wandering, and then off I go into my day and it's a great way to start.”
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