Nourish Your Passions

While we might not have the best sleep schedules, please don't take this graph too seriously. Get some rest!

Most of what we write about on the blog deals with life as a professional artist. Usually, that means we talk about things like motivation, finding outlets for your work, inspiration, success, goals, and other stuff like that. However, today, we want to speak a little bit about the other, rarely-spoken-about aspect of an artist's life: other passions.

While it is hard enough to keep on nourishing your art, especially if you're not a 100% full-time artist (someone who is making a living solely off of their art), you also cannot neglect your other dreams and passions.

While this seems a bit contradictory to a lot of the success formulas we've talked about before, we think it's crucial as a human being, and will help prevent burnout as an artist. While this might not apply to you if your only passion in life is art, for us, we have many things in life that we enjoy besides just creating art. We both love to cook, like the outdoors, enjoy sports and dancing, and love music. Granted, painting, designing, and illustrating are our top choices of activities, but when it's all you do, you can easily burn out.

Recently, Monkey has taken a bit of time out of going 110% full-out art-business mode and taken a bit of time to experiment in the kitchen again. He really enjoys coming up with new recipes and recently made the time to come up with two gourmet vegan sandwiches.

While Saturday nights in the Monkey + Seal household are usually spent blogging, researching, or creating concept art, we took the night off recently to head out to a friend's birthday party. The 80's music was going non-stop and we had a blast dancing the night away.

We'll be the first to admit that we're not the all-art-all-the-time artists that some might aspire to be. We're not as famous as James Jean or David Choe or Sam Flores or Tim Burton, many of whom have hustled non-stop for years and worked their asses off to get where they are. But, we also know that while the hustle of an artist takes crazy amounts of dedication, time, and blood, sweat, and tears, if you go too long without a break you won't make it either.

Spend time with friends and family. If you enjoy writing, work on it for 15 minutes at least once a week. Take your time a bit in the kitchen if you like cooking. While we highly encourage you to prioritize your art, just make sure that you're not letting it completely take over your life. Having it take over most of your life is okay, but just don't give it all of it.