Nela's Art Chat

In this episode I'm painting a watercolor paint and watercolor pencil fantasy portrait, while sharing lots of tips that can help you create more art. As a person with ADHD 🧠 I often struggle finding motivation, energy, and time to create elaborate pieces of art. I thought about this a lot and tried many different methods, and now I'm sharing the most effective ones with you!

In this episode of Nela’s Art Chat I’m sharing the process of creating a moody, drippy mixed media portrait in my recycled sketchbook while talking about an overlooked topic: emotional labor.

• What kind of impact it has on creative workers?
• Why do we often find personal work easier and less draining than commissioned work?
• How can we protect ourselves from excessive emotional labor so we don't burn out?

In this episode of Nela’s Art Chat I'm sharing the process of creating a drippy mixed media portrait in a sketchbook and talking about the difference between skill and talent. How can we recognize and use our own talents? What to do if you donʼt feel like youʼre talented?

For centuries before the internet became available to the average person, there was a clear distinction between producing creative work, and publishing or promoting it. Writers, painters, musicians, directors, sculptors, and choreographers would spend months or years producing a new body of work in the privacy of their studio. Only when the work was ready to be shared with the audience, the creator (or their publicist) would make arrangements to announce the new project in the media, and give radio, TV, and magazine interviews. There was a time to dive deep into their creative process, and there was a time for attention and conversation.

Since creatives started using websites, email newsletters, and social media to keep their fans up to date, these two processes have blended together and it’s difficult to tell them apart. There is an expectation that we need to keep people engaged in between big releases, while creating said big releases at the same time.

There were always differences between artists with more means and those on a very tight budget. But in the internet age, we can literally see each others’ paint palettes from across the globe, and it breeds a green-eyed monster called the art supply envy. If you're experiencing it as well, in this episode of Nela's Art Chat I'm sharing some tips how to deal with it.

Have you created any dark art, and are a bit confused because you don’t know where these spooky images are coming from?
Or is your loved one creating dark art and you’re worried about their mental health?
In this episode I’ll help you make sense of dark, spooky, creepy, gory, and macabre art and explain why some people find it so appealing.

In this episode I discuss how creativity and the arts can improve our mental health and help us maintain a healthy outlook on life, give  meaning to our life, and help us deal with daily challenges and grief. I would love for more people to learn about this power of creativity that  anyone can use in their life.

Finding balance between personal creative practice and paid work can be a challenge. Our jobs may not give us 100% of the creative fulfillment that we need, and we also may have our own inspiration and ideas we want to follow. Personal practice is an excellent way to stave off creative burnout, and it helps us keep our skills sharp and develop our unique style. In this episode, I offer tips how to justify spending time on creative practice, and incorporate more spontaneous creativity into your life.

We need to talk about how creatives can support social change, and why we should. Our talent and skills have power. We can use those powers to uphold the status quo, or we can use them to inspire and enact change. If you already aren’t convinced why we all need to take a more active role in our society, I hope this episode will make you at least consider joining me and thousands of creatives across the world in this effort.

There are positive and beneficial sides to comparing our work to that of other artists, and there are also plenty of drawbacks. In today’s episode of Nela’s Art Chat I’m drawing a magical winter fairy colored pencil portrait while talking about how to productively compare your art with others’ so you can learn from it, and how to change your mindset so you don’t fall into the black hole of hating your own work because it’s not “good enough”.

Sometimes you put in a ton of effort into an artwork and in the end you realize that it just sucks. It doesn’t look anything like you’ve  envisioned it, and you feel like you’ve just wasted a lot of time on  something that wasn’t worth it. In today’s episode of Nela’s Art Chat  you can watch me paint a mermaid that did not turn out the way I wanted,  while I talk about 4 different ways you can deal with similar “art  fails” of your own.

What if you don’t want to be a professional artist? What if you want to remain an amateur forever, or at least at the moment? There’s a lot of  pressure on creatives to earn money with their skills, and I can tell you from personal experience that sometimes it’s not a wise thing to do.  I’m much happier keeping my drawing and painting practice personal, and in this episode I’ll tell you why I made this choice.

Inktober, Mermay, Drawing August, 100 days project, 36  days of type... there's no shortage of art challenges, and many of us are asking ourselves "Should I do one this year?" If you've never done an art challenge, in this episode of Nela's Art Chat I give you some of  my tips on how to decide, and how to prepare if you do end up doing one.
In the video (link below), you can watch a time lapse of my ink mermaid drawing from start to finish.