What do busy art days look like? Why is everything about to get busier? Let me tell you over this morning's coffee.

Over these past couple of weeks, I haven't had much down time. I have a bit now, but only for about half an hour, so I'm going to think fast and type fast.

I don't know if I've mentioned this on my blog, but I've definitely been alluding to it on Twitter, but I have a real life job now. I recently got hired at a big showjumping barn in Alberta as a full-time trainer and barn manager, and will be working with both mini prix and grand prix competitors. I will also, in the next year, be sponsored as one of their riders. I know it's not art but it's a solid job and, in the end, what I want as a career, so I'm going to do with it for now and see where it gets me.

On the other hand, my fine arts business has exploded all over everywhere with awesomeness and popularity and I'm not 100% sure how it happened.

I was not going through a good time, two-three weeks ago. Art was happening, but not fast enough (I was barely making enough to cover bills), the writing won't pay off on a monetary basis for another few months, and my music tanked with one band bowing out and the other sans bass player. We got a couple of shows this month and a few next, but it's still only $150 for me per show, and $300/mo from music is nice but not enough to pay rent.

So an old customer of mine came back a couple of weeks ago and laid down three commissions after I had just picked up commissions from about 5 different authors. And then there were my two corporate customers that were paying off every couple of weeks but being extremely frustrating about it/horrible to work with but still paying well.

Well, when this customer came back and started showing off the new pieces I did for her, another couple of farms stepped up and wanted some done too. A major showjumping competitor (I cant's say who but he was in the Olympics and isn't Canadian...) caught wind of the horse-related designs from my ex-boyfriend (who is still a very good friend of mine and competes in grand prix showjumping) and he and I are currently e-mailing back and forth talking money and commissions and timelines, along with contacting professional photographers to get the rights to their photos so I can legally copy them.

So all in all, it's suddenly very busy. I have three farms, five authors, two businesses, and a freaking Olympian on the go right now. Which is too much, in short. I actually can't do them all at once, so a few are circulating through wait lists, especially seeing how they're ALL for multiple commissions.

Which is cool, if it keeps up. If I am always this successful in art, then I probably won't do anything but horse training and art for the rest of my life. Which is fine. I would like that.

So I just want to talk, really quick in the next couple of minutes here, what a day in the life of a busy artist looks like.

This morning is a pretty typical day. It's a weekend, so I'm taking it a little easy, but I'm going to run down my typical day.

First, I get up. I look at my ragged self in the mirror across from my bed and have a 10-minute silent argument with myself assuring myself that, in fact, if I do not un-lazy and take a shower, I will scare all of my customers with my poofy, poofy mane.

So I take a shower and then grab my laptop and sit over my breakfast and coffee, scrolling through e-mails and making a list on a word document of things that have to get done today and filtering through the big list of things I have on the go to see if there's anything else I can take on.

After the coffee, I head to my "studio." A lot of artists have a separate room for their studio, mine is now my bedroom. I have a table set up and a paper-sized space laid out on it, while every other surface in my room is piled with art paper, pencil boxes, art tools, concept sketches, paint tubes, and other various art supplies.

Before I used to put them away every day on a nice tall and thin Ikea shelf I have, but lately there's been too much daily art to be able to do that, so it's chaos time.

I work on one piece for a few hours, then take a couple hours to reply to e-mails and dig up some references. I then head back to working on a piece for another few hours. Then I re-check my e-mails, reply to any new ones, make any phone calls that need to be made in relation to art, and if there's digital work to do, I do it. This includes photo re-touching to showcase on my website, cleaning up line art to send to people, and creating some time lapses for the people who are interested in them. This usually takes me to the early evening, in which my productive gear kicks in and I art for about 6-7 hours straight. This takes me to late at night where I will get back into any digital work and comb out the list of things to do again. If there's any feedback from anyone I've e-mailed progress to, I will fix what they need fixed, and by the time I wrap up I've worked straight all day and it's usually the early hours of the morning.

I sleep for about 6-7 hours and then do it all again.

I've been doing this for two weeks.

It's crazy. Seriously.

Today I have to meet in person with two customers and then go art supply shopping because I'm out of fixative and HB/3B/3H pencils. And THEN I have to go buy super glue because in 5 days I'm going out to the show jumping barn and giving some of the competition horses test runs and strutting my stuff once more for the owners so they can feel okay about letting me work unsupervised with $20k-$35k horses.

EDIT: ALSO LAST SUNDAY I SAW ERIC LAMAZE LIVE. I'm not lying. Seriously. I almost died. I did cry. Because he gave a very moving speech and I was so excited that I was shaking so moving speech just tipped me over the edge.

Here's a picture I took. That's him. I am such a creeper.

He didn't ride because his horse is young/inexperienced, but I DID see Ian Miller, Rich Fellers, Robert Whitaker, and many many more phenomenal riders ride the course. I learned a lot and got that much more excited to start my show jumping job.