 Hi, I'm Sandy Olak, and I'm painting like I'm running out of time. One of my favorite lines in any song in Hamilton is the point at which people start asking Alexander Hamilton, why do you write like you're running out of time? He is frantically writing the Federalist papers, just writing and writing and writing. And his whole life is filled with writing, but he just can't stop writing. And he had so many ideas to get out, he just was so intense. It drove everybody around him crazy. I feel like that's where I am as an artist right now. I'm in this very strange period that I haven't experienced probably since college, when my eyes were awakened to a lot of artistic things within me. But there's been something stirring. And it started with watercolor a few years ago. And when I got to this certain point last year, things started to really change. And it felt really dark at first, but I want to assure you everything's okay. I'm all right. I got to the end of Christmas season. And Christmas season, as you may know as crafters, it's an onslaught of videos and ideas and new stamps and new techniques and getting everybody all excited to make their Christmas cards. It feels like being on a giant hamster wheel of production. And it's not that I was sharing things I didn't like, I just felt like, is that really what I am doing as an artist? Is that all I've got going on is helping people to slog through the Christmas cards. And there was just something in me that hit a wall at that time period. And I decided to take a sabbatical in December from making YouTube videos. I still worked on a class and launched a class shortly thereafter, the Casting Shadows class, because lots of people had wanted it and that gave me some time to work on that one. But when January came, I decided I was gonna take a little step back, just a little bit. And instead of making three to four videos a week, I'd make two to three videos a week. So I only assure them on Mondays and Fridays and then sometimes a little extra in the middle. Made another set of people mad because they want three free videos instead of two free videos. And yeah, I got to deal with the blowback from that. There have been some repercussions because, of course, when you're putting out less videos, you're making less income. And my sanity, to me, was much more important than the income at this point. And I'm glad that I did because I actually ended up with time to produce some more classes that people really wanted. I have the Rainy Days series, so a pencil, watercolor, and Copic class on Coloring Rain. And I've got a brand new watercolor class, a brand new Copic class on Tulips. I've got all kinds of fun things that I'm sharing that I couldn't do if I was so busy doing that many card videos. And it's amazing how cutting out one extra video a week made such a huge difference in my time. During this time period, I also started doing something else, which is joining other artists locally. There's watercolor societies. There's urban sketchers, different groups of artists locally that I had not really engaged with because I was so busy. I didn't have time to put anything else on my plate. And I've started to make artist friends that I can sit and have coffee with or have dinner with and talk about art stuff. And I have my craft friends, absolutely. And we talk about craft art things, and that's great. But we talk about stamp sets and new releases and various things like that. As opposed to the art crowd, they don't know anything about that. So we go in a different direction. It's more of a philosophical idea of art and what it means to you and how it feels and that sort of thing. And it's been something that's really grown me inside in a very different way. And what it's led to, though, is that I'm practically painting like I'm running out of time. If I can paint two or three paintings a day, I'm a happy camper. And if I don't, I can sense the change in my mood. I really crave that opportunity to paint. And watercolor is giving me satisfaction like nothing else has done in a really long time. Because I love to learn. I love to be challenged with new things. And boy, is watercolor a challenge. There is always something new to learn. And I will never master it. But I'm feeling very frantic about wanting to find who I am as a watercolorist. And even though I post a lot of my practice paintings and stuff on my social media, and everybody's like, oh, well, that's really great, I really struggled with that because those are OK paintings. But those paintings haven't carried my vision as of yet. I'm still painting like my instructors. And I'm trying to find what's me in the midst of all that. It's not about me trying to paint like somebody else. And I don't know what that is yet. But the more I paint, the more I know I'm going to get to that point where I find out who I am. I talked with one of my instructors last week. And he told a story about when he was young and getting started as an artist. Now, I'm middle-aged. Not exactly a spring chicken like he was. But his story really helped me. He moved from his home country of Uruguay. And he moved to Australia. And he, as an immigrant there, he wanted to make good for himself before he went back home. He wanted to make a name for himself as an artist. And he rented a little teeny tiny apartment. It had enough room for a little tiny single bed. It had a little TV and a table that he painted at 24-7. He was just always painting and chucking the painting. Paint another one, chuck that one. Paint another one, chuck that one. And just forever, he went on and on doing this in this little, tiny, dark apartment. He had neighbors that were doing domestic violence stuff on the other side of the thin walls. It was in a bad neighborhood. He had to make desserts at a local cafe in order to have them pay him by giving him a meal so he could eat every day. And he had to try to find somebody to buy one of his little paintings so that he could pay his rent. And he spent a really long time in that wilderness trying to find out who he was as a painter. And hearing his story about how long that took him gave me great courage that I can do that too. It'll take me some time to get there. But the more I paint, the sooner I'm gonna get to who I am as a painter and what's going to make me paint like I was made to paint. I don't know if any of this is helpful to anybody else, but it was certainly helpful to me to have that comfort, to know that it's all about the practice. It really is about spending time painting. It's the only way to learn how to do it better. And the more I study and learn and grow as an artist, the more I'm going to have to share with artists that are my students. So if you're one of those people who's been upset with me for cutting back on some things and putting my emphasis in different directions, it'll all come back to you, I promise, in some amazing art, but I just don't know what that's gonna look like. I don't have a picture of how long this will take to be in this place of frantic painting. But what I do know is that the experiment that I've run in this first part of the year with doing fewer videos has some failures and some successes that came along with it. Failures are things like income dropped because I'm not doing as many videos and YouTube is still dealing with their really terrible algorithm. It's really awful. And my videos aren't getting shared very much at all and views just keep dropping and dropping and dropping. I feel awful for those who don't have the number of subscribers that I do, people who have a thousand subscribers and get 30 views on a video. That's demoralizing for people. So if you see one of those videos, click that like button and leave them a positive, cheery comment. And on my videos, you can do the same thing too because I could always use that as well. It really means a lot to know that our art that we're producing for free out here on YouTube really means something to people. The success side of things though is that since I've been able to produce those extra classes, I've also been able to make up that income because I'm putting the emphasis where it's making a difference. People want to learn in a deeper way. They want to learn bigger ideas and I can teach those in a class that I can't do here on a video here on YouTube. And I don't really purport to do fine art stuff here all that much on YouTube. It's all just my short, crafty videos. But what I'd like to do is take that Wednesday day that doesn't have a video on it anymore and potentially post, maybe not every week, but post some kind of fine art and it might be in any kind of medium. I'm practicing with everything. I'm playing with all kinds of stuff. And I'd like to tie it to a card on my blog. So if you see a picture of a jellyfish that I draw on one video, there's probably gonna be a jellyfish card over on my blog. So if you want to see how to use that technique on a card, then you can jump over to the blog because I still want to keep that card making stuff going. But the fine art videos, I'm probably not going to be voicing them over. One of the reasons is because I kind of don't know what to say about some of that because a lot of it is experimentation. And I'm not posting them for everybody to feel like they're getting a class and a sit-down tutorial. And here you draw this line, draw that line, color it this way, like I do with my crafty videos or my classes. I'm posting them to inspire you to show you that the mediums that you're already using for your crafting can be used to create incredible fine art or you can take a fine art technique and apply it to your crafting. If you're somebody who can paint a tree on a card, you can paint a tree in a landscape. And I want to give you that bigger picture, that rounder encouragement to grow in different directions, not just keep yourself to I'm only a card maker and I can't do anything else. You're so much more than that. And you have such possibilities and hopefully by watching my crazy journey of discovering myself as an artist, I can inspire you to do the same kind of thing in whatever way you're built to create and inspire you to dig deeper and see what it is that brings you joy. What is it that you do that no one else can do? That's what I'm looking for for myself. What makes me unique and makes my artistic expression and vision come forth in the mediums that I choose. And you can do the very same thing. So I hope this was encouraging to you. It's kind of scary to me as well as encouraging. I'm excited about the journey and I don't know where it's gonna end. I kind of hope that it doesn't end. That would kind of be nice to have that ongoing everlasting growth as an artist. Although I would like to arrive at some portion of the destination so I know kind of what my vision is as an artist because I haven't really put my hands around that to grasp it quite yet. Thank you so much for sticking with me through this little chit chatty video. I will see you again very soon. I'm off to Alaska in a couple of days for a speech competition. And if you're in Anchorage, then I will put the details for the location and everything of the contest in the doobly-doo down below and you can come and watch me give a speech. I'll see you guys later. Bye-bye.