That again is an example where it could be very easy to look at the way someone else is doing it because you're not yet quite secure in your own process and go, huh, can I be doing it that way?

Yes, because I could look at you and say, oh Alice has this period where she focuses on a

sketchbooks and she gathers all her ideas and it's very organized and all I do is blob paint around in mine and I don't even know why I'm doing that half the time and it's just something to do.

Welcome to Art Juice, This is honest, generous and humorous conversations that will feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me Alice Sheridan and me Louise Fletcher.

And we took a bit of a break last week which you'll hear about if you listen right to the end if you're remotely missed us but it's as we said we would do sometimes when life catches up with you and sometimes something has to give and last week this did not for any bad reasons just busy reasons anyway we're here today and we're going to be chatting about, what do we going to be

chatting about sense of obligation, how to manage your time over the summer perhaps,

but before we get into that what have you been up to since we last

chatted i was kind of dreading that question so i was thinking what have i been up to

actually have i been up to and this leads into our main topic I suppose there's so much personal stuff happening at the moment and just places I need to be for other people.

That work is taking a little bit of a back seat.

But I am moving forward with preparations for this year's Find Your Joy

and that has meant getting my team back together.

We've had meetings.

Everything is pretty much recorded now, but there's a few last bits and pieces to record and I've got my teenage neighbor doing the editing for me so I've been given her direction so there's been a lot of that I've been trying to build up content for my membership so that I'd have to worry about that when the course is running, painting I've been on and off with, I've been really inspired one day, done a bit and then go a week. It's been nearly a week where I've not touched it.

Yes, I've been busy but also I've been feeling, nah, I don't think I've got anything to add at the moment. I don't think anything I do will work out well.

And I'm all right with that, whereas I once would have panicked. I just think I'm very busy,

you know, this is not, you can't, Tracy said something. I don't know if she said it on the podcast last week or after we finish recording, but she said it on the podcast that we use a lot of our creative energy in what we do when we teach other people.

Yeah. And when you're busy building up for a period of teaching you are using a lot of that creative energy and you have to be kind to yourself and realize that you're not going to also be really creative art-wise. I think that's the sacrifice we both make a lot of the time. Yeah I think it comes back down to this

ridiculously crazy assumption that you can be firing on all cylinders all the time.

Yes, and you definitely cannot, can I just say my body has just told me that I can't do that by giving me back pain.

And then when that didn't work making it go around to my stomach and then giving me a

bad shoulder, a migraine and finally when that didn't work an upset stomach until I was one day just laying there on the bed going I feel terrible everywhere and I thought yeah it's time to rest a little bit. Yeah and then what happened you had to stop a bit?

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