October Chat
What’s in this month’s issue:
October Pinterest Board
October Color Palettes
Setting a Creative Mood
Creating Healthier Instagram Habits
In case you missed it
Basic Life Updates
Timelapse for the Road
Autumn Aesthetics
I’ve spent some time getting inspired and putting together a fun October Pinterest board again this month. I really love using Pinterest to store my photos. Some of them may not be useful to me right now, but once I’ve made the board, I have a nice database that I can peruse when I need some inspiration.
For this month, when picking the photos, I finally decided to fully embrace autumn and let all those juicy fall colors get onto the board. I was also considering what pictures have potential storytelling opportunities, nice foreground inspiration and looking for some moodier photos so it’s not just all orange all the time. I think it’s easy to get caught up in changing leaves and forget things like misty mornings, early evenings and grey skies as the days shorten. I wanted to capture that aspect as well in what I put together for you this month.
October Color Palettes
I love some nice color inspiration. So, here are three palettes I’m using this month for you to try. I also included some pieces I did using those palettes to help give some ideas on how they might be used. I think they go really nicely with the inspiration photos on this month’s Pinterest board. I love it when things feel like they are working nicely together!
Setting the Mood
October is the start of a cozy month and feels like a great time to share one of my tips for when I’m struggling to focus on my work, setting the mood. This involves things that I do to tell my mind that it’s drawing time now so I can get into that sweet sweet flow state. My version of this is the following: put on a favorite podcast (not just any old one, but one I really love), light a candle (my favorite is sweater weather) and sit in my drawing nook (my drawing nook is a chair in the corner of my bedroom).
Maybe some of you already set the mood and don’t even realize it. If you haven’t set the mood before, what kinds of things make you feel calm and creative? What might you do for yourself so you know this is creative time? What little things do you do that make you feel happy and comfortable? I’d love to hear what things you do to set the mood for yourself or what things you might like to try.
Instagram Habits
I’ve been thinking a lot this month about social media and my relationship to it. I love the chance to connect, but as an introvert, I feel a struggle to connect. I’m good about sharing things when it’s on my own terms, but I struggle with engaging at times because I’m not in the mood to be social. I’ve made myself a small goal of trying to be better about responding to comments.
On the flip side, I’ve been trying to pull away from social media, in terms of the control it’s been exerting on my life. My account mysteriously started growing in August of 2021. It was exciting and addicting that suddenly people were finding me and interested in my work, but with that came a kind of compulsion to check the app…a lot. I’ve been dealing with the Instagram obsession ever since. Everyone loves the idea of growing an amount of followers, but I think it’s easy to forget that that can come with some downsides too. I did not expect an increase in Instagram addiction.
So, I’ve developed a few new habits that I think make my usage more healthy and perhaps they can help you too.
Nighttime Posts: I started posting at night, around 9-10PM so that I then start bedtime routine type things and can more easily ignore the app. The rule is that I can’t check it again until morning. The goal here is to keep from checking back in on every like and comment. It also means I can batch respond to comments so that I don’t feel overwhelmed by engaging socially multiple times, but just once or twice on my own terms.
App Limits: I have set the limit of 5 Instagram checks a day (I am legitimately still struggling with this!). The amount of times I mindlessly open the app each day is too high. I listened to a podcast recently where they talked about social media as a drug, but we don’t see it that way because it breaks with our traditional understanding of how drugs work. I can feel myself opening the app to get my hit of likes and then exiting. I want to break that habit because I don’t feel that it’s healthy. Especially when I should be engaging in real world things and I’m wondering about social media.
Hide Like Count: I forget this sometimes because you have to do it every time you post and from what I can tell, you can’t turn them off for reels. It’s been good though when I do remember because not only can others not see how many likes a post has, but you have to work to find out how many likes your post has. It’s helped to remove this pressure I had of each post needing to be better than the one before and then feeling a little defeated if it didn’t do as well. A lot of “what am I doing wrong” type questions or “I really liked that one, why didn’t others?”, which is all unhelpful when all you want to do is make cool art.
In Case You Missed It
Occasionally, I put out calls for tutorial ideas, things people might want help with to improve their art practice and backgrounds are asked for all of the time. I’ve been avoiding it because there’s just no way that I can share how to make a background in 90 seconds. So, I’ve tried to design around the problem and have started a type of Instagram art class. If you’ve missed it, the first two reels are up. One focuses on preparing to make some art and gathering reference and the second hones in on making a sketch using a reference image. I’ve also decided to integrate some draw along Instagram lives to supplement the reels, mostly because I realized trying to teach how to sketch in 90 seconds was also pretty bare bones. The first draw along live is also posted in the same reels section.
Reels come out on Thursdays and lives are on Fridays. The lives will be saved and I am trying to announce the time for Friday’s live on Thursday. I’ve also been including class materials on my saved stories so anyone who comes late to the party can still access all of the things needed.
I hope I get more feedback on it as it goes along so that I know it it’s working for people. If you’re someone who is using those materials, do let me know!
Basic Life Updates
I finally bought some flights and am going back to Ohio at the end of October. I’m super excited, but also a little nervous because Luna (my cat) and Aaron (my dog) will be without me and they still aren’t getting along with each other as well as I had hoped. I spend a lot of time with Luna since my work area is her safe space and I worry if she’ll be okay without me. They wont be alone at home so no worries there, but with just one person between the two of them, I know it will be different to spread the time out so they both get the attention they need.
I’m also very excited to get back to Ohio because while I’ve built a nice life in Austria, it’s never really been home so I do feel torn between both places. I’ll also get to spend my Birthday and Thanksgiving in the US for the first time in 13 years! If you’re a person who knows I was also a teacher and are trying to figure out how I will manage to be in the US for so long, the answer is that I’ve quit my job and gone full time freelance. I’ve not officially announced that anywhere so surprise you little group of subscribers. You’re the first to know! I’m nervous about how everything will work out and I’m still organizing a lot of things in the background, but so far I’m really happy with how things are going. Leaving my job has already been one big boost to my mental health, it’s also why I’ve been able to launch things like this newsletter because I feel like I finally have some extra time now to put my energy into little projects and ideas that excite me.
In terms of entertainment, guys I’ve been playing so much Civilization VI. Once I open that game, you lose me. I think what they do well is that there’s never really a good stopping point so you play and play and play. In the land of podcasts, I’m into “Not Past It” this month. It’s a history podcast and the idea is that the event they discuss happened in the same week of the podcast, just in the past, of course. I’m going to tell you my dirty secret now too, I’ve been watching Partner Track on Netflix. Should I be embarrassed to admit that? I don’t know! If you have any shows or podcast recommendations, please give them to me! I feel like I’m on the edge of being out of good content to binge!
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