Art goals for 2024
Join me as I dive into my creative goals for 2024 and how I'm planning to achieve them. From completing three new painting collections to exploring fabric designs, I'm pushing my artistic boundaries. I'll share my journey to formalise my creative process, including marrying sketchbook work with canvas paintings and establishing a consistent colour palette. Plus, get a sneak peek into the business side of being a full-time artist.
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One of my motivations for setting up this YouTube channel in the first place was to bring you into my thought processes when it comes to how I'm developing my creative practice, how my work is developing, and what kind of active steps I'm taking to do that. Welcome back to Zuzu's Haus of Cats, the show where I take you behind the scenes of my life as a professional artist. I'm Eli Trier, and today I thought we'd talk a little bit about setting creative goals.
So I thought we go through a few things today. I want to take you through my like, overarching goals for 2024 and then we'll look at kind of boiling that down a little bit, and what I'm going to focus on in the next sort of month, and how I'm actually going to achieve those goals, what steps, like concrete steps, I'm going to take to achieve them. And then finally, we'll touch a little bit on the sort of the business side of being an artist, because I feel like that's something that that doesn't get talked about a lot. So we'll touch on that a little bit, and I'll point you in direction where you can get some more information if that's something that you're interested in.
Let's start by talking about my big creative goals for 2024, so I have sort of three main goals for this year. First of all, I would like to complete another three collections this year, of like paintings on either paper or canvas. I'd really like them to be sort of big canvases, like a meter plus, because that's really what makes me happy. So yeah, so three more collections of large work I would love.
Goal number two, I would love to get my I've been working on some, like, some abstracted, really painterly fabric designs. I don't really know how to get them onto fabric, but that's something that I'm really interested in playing around with this year, my kind of my dream would be to have a range of fabric designs and then to make or to get somebody else to make clothes out of my own design, maybe like home fabrics or something like that. I don't really know. It's just something that's kind of tugging at me. Whether or not it will happen this year, I'm not sure, but it's definitely something that I'm very interested in right now, and also sort of textile based, more of like a personal goal. I have turned some of my paintings into needlepoint designs, and that's something that I quite like to do again in the future. That's quite a nice, kind of cozy winter time project. So maybe I'll do that for when it starts getting cold again next winter.
Finally, the most important, biggest goal that I have is to find a way to formalize my creative process a little bit. Now that I'm doing this all time, I feel like my, you know, wait for inspiration to strike and float into the studio and do whatever I want while I love the energy of that. I also want to kind of tighten things up and bring a bit more sort of structure and discipline to my practice. That doesn't necessarily mean producing more final work. I want to be in the studio like every day. I want to be making sure that I'm opening my sketchbook app every day and putting pigment on paper.
Basically, there's a few kind of formalizing things, like the marrying up my sketchbook work with the work that I do on canvas. At the moment, I see them as two sort of separate things, and I think that comes from being an illustrator and using my sketchbook as like a work tool, and then creating work that's somehow completely different on canvas. It feels like those two things, there's a separation there. And I'd like to bring them together more, because I think I could be using my sketchbook more to inform the work that I'm doing on canvas. And I think that'd be a really interesting process to do. I think it would really help to improve my observation skills, my kind of motto for my artwork. You'll know this if you've seen my studio tour video. I'll link that at the top here somewhere. My mantra is carefully observed, loosely rendered, and I think everything that I can do to improve my observation skills is just going to make my work better long term.
So those are my three main goals, to complete three new collections, to do some textile explorations and to formalize my creative process and turn it into something that's more structured. Stopping have a drink of tea. It's a lot of talking, lovely.
So what I want to focus on for the next month or two, so into sort of March and April, is really that third goal so formalizing my creative practice. So I've isolated a couple of things that I'd like to do. The first one is to formalize my color palette a little bit more. So I have a very clear color vocabulary when it comes to my work on Canvas, and I reach for the same colors, the same mixes i. Over and over and over again, and I really feel like they speak to who I am as a painter and what I'm trying to express particular way that I use color and color combinations together. I feel like is really part of my artistic identity, and that's something that's lacking in the work I do in my sketchbook.
I've been using a lot of new media over the last year, mixed media, all sorts of stuff, colored pencils, dry pastels, oil pastels, all sorts of stuff that I'm not 100% comfortable with, and I've just been kind of randomly picking colors and hoping for the best. And it's been fine. It's been fun. And I think you do need that kind of complete openness to play and explore and try new, new things. But I'm getting to the point now where I'd really like to just kind of tighten things up a bit, and I think it will, it will help me to do this kind of marriage of canvas work and sketchbook work if I'm choosing similar colors. So I'm actually, I'm going to do a video on this of how I'm taking the colors from my paintings, for my canvas work, and then replicating those colors in the various different dry media. And I'm not saying that those are the only colors I'm ever gonna use, but I think having that kind of familiar vocabulary is really gonna help, to help me to see how I can I can start planning paintings and being a little bit more formal with that side of my process. Yeah, so I'm gonna take you along on that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a video about that and take you along for the journey. And, yeah, I think it'll be, I think it'll be a fun video. I think it'd be an interesting experiment to do. And I'm very interested to see what happens to my sketchbook work. Then when I'm using the same color palette, the second thing I want to do is, again, this kind of marriage of Canvas and sketch work, painting and drawing.
I have a painting that I started back in the summer, which it was in the studio when I had a lot of visitors. I had too many people's opinions on it whilst it was in the process of being made before I'd really kind of settled in with it. It was a new subject for me. It was a nude and it was the biggest Canvas I'd ever done, enormous canvas, like huge, I can't even remember how big it was, 120 by 160 I think so. I was already uncomfortable, and I tightened up, and I tightened up and I tightened up, and I took all these people's different opinions on board, and it was just it's now a face to the wall in my bedroom, just in shame, and it's been there for about six months, but what I want to do is bring it back out. And again, I'm going to make a video on this and take you through the process. I'm going to bring it back out. I'm going to use my sketchbook. I'm going to use my new, kind of streamlined color palette to plan out what I'm going to do with it, how I'm going to finish it, how I'm going to sort of rescue it from the state it's in right now. Yeah, we'll go through that together, and hopefully at the end of it, I'll end up with a nice process of sort of planning and fixing paintings in my sketchbook, and also a piece of work that I'm really proud of, that I really feel speaks to how I want to communicate this particular subject. So that's the second one I want to do.
And then the third thing I want to do is I want to try and start for 10 or 15 minutes first thing in the morning when I come into the studio, I just want to open up my sketchbook and have a little play, no kind of finished drawings, no kind of intense process or anything like that. I just like to be drawing every single day I'm in the studio, and that's just weekdays. I don't work weekends. That's the time I spend with Lars, and it's sacred and special and lovely. So yeah, but make it part of my work. Make it the most important thing, top priority, first thing that gets done every single day. I think that will really help to build a more regular habit. So even if I'm in a fallow period after producing a lot of final work, I'm not just completely away from from my creativity and my creative process. So that's what I'm going to do to achieve those goals this month.
Finally, I just want to touch on some business stuff. Now. I have been sort of working towards transitioning into being a full time artist for about a year now, and getting stuff set up, figuring out how I wanted to do it. There are so many different ways of making a living as an artist, and I did a lot of experiments to figure out what that was. I just closed my business down, my old business. I was a business and a marketing consultant, and I just closed that business down this month, in February, and now I am a full time artist. So my main focus this month has really been establishing my business model and setting up various income streams and marketing channels and making sure that this is going to be sustainable for me and that I'm not going to burn myself out or damage my relationship with my creativity.
As some of you will know if you've been following me for a while, I was actually an illustrator for a number of years, and I actually got very, very burnt out, partly because of, well, mostly because of being creative to somebody else's specifications. I'm not very good at doing what other people want me to do. So a big part of this artist. Journey now is making absolutely sure that I am staying true to myself 100% and not trying to force my creative practice into any kind of, you know, restrictive box, just for the money. So yeah, having a number of different income streams is very, very important to me. Obviously, selling original paintings is going to be one of them, and one that I hope will be a big part of it. But the fact of the matter is, I just don't produce enough original paintings in a year to sustain me.
So yeah, if you're interested in learning more about business models or setting up a creative business so that it can sustain you, not only financially, but emotionally and, you know, creatively and everything else. I do actually have a Patreon where I talk about business stuff. I do business workshops, and I share much more deeply the behind the scenes of what I'm doing and how I'm doing it to build this life as an artist professionally that I've been doing at the moment. So do check out the link in the description of this video or in my about page, and you'll see a link there to my Patreon.
Something else I've been doing a lot this month is applying to open calls. So there's been a few gallery open calls, a couple of competitions, various other things that have kind of floated into my sphere attention lately. And I sat down this month and went through all of them and applied to several roles that look like they might be interesting. There's one in particular. I'm not going to say what it is, because I don't want to jinx it, but there's one in particular that I would really, really, really love to get. But whenever I do any submissions or anything like that, I always assume that I'm going to get rejected. And the point of doing them, really for me, is just to practice talking about my work, sharing it with people, taking myself seriously as an artist. So whatever happens, I've done my bit, and I'm happy with that, but yeah, I'd really like to get one of them. Very much. We'll see what happens. I'll let you know. But yeah, I also there's a video on Patreon all about dig submissions, or there will be, possibly, depending on when this goes up. I've got a video planned for for doing that.
And then the other thing that I'm still trying to figure out is balancing the work that needs to be done on the business and then my creative time, I tend to go like swing wildly into nothing but creation, which is what I did at the end of last year I was preparing for an exhibition. I did the launch of my online shop. I made 120 odd paintings, and did absolutely nothing on the business side of things the last couple of months, I think I just kind of, I just used myself up creatively. So I've been in this sort of fallow period, and I've been focusing very much on business things, and I haven't made very much in the last couple of months, which is absolutely fine, but I just think it's something to keep an eye on and be a bit more intentional with the kind of the ebb and flow of whether I'm working on a business or whether I'm working on the making of the work and the creativity side of things.
So there we go. That's our video this week. I really, really hope you found it useful. I know I found it really useful. And I think these videos, if you like them, and if you want me to carry on doing them, I think they're going to be really helpful for me as well. So if you liked it, if you'd like to see me do this kind of every month, just like a wrap up of where I am and how my practice is developing, please do leave me a comment down below and let me know what you think. But other than that, thank you so much for watching. I really, really appreciate you being here. I'm so grateful to all of you who subscribe and who watch my videos. This is a real labor of love. I just I've fallen in love with filmmaking, and I'm so happy that I get to do this. So thank you all for watching and yeah, here's to achieving all of your creative goals for this year. I'll let you know how I get on next month, but for now, I'll see you next week with a brand new video. Bye, bye.
