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

Last week I had a great discussion with Astrid Brack and we were talking about marketing

your business without social media and it got some great questions going over on

Instagram and I think a lot of you thinking and of course Louise wasn't part of that if you haven't listened to that

conversation do go back and have a listen because I think this is going to be quite

an important part of this year and we thought today we would take the time to talk about this idea between the two of us.

What does marketing mean and perhaps a different way of thinking about marketing because I think there's something in the word marketing that often ties people up in knots and we've both got of course a different viewpoint on that that we hope you will find helpful. But first of all, what have you been up to in your week?

That da da da, I've been painting.

And I apologize everyone for my voice. I'm perfectly fine so don't send in messages of sympathy.

I've just kind of lost my voice a little bit so I apologize for that.

But I have been working hard in my studio. I did in my membership group we did a

creative kick start to start the year and I had to come up with all the different ways I was thinking of all the different ways that I generate ideas for myself and then I put them into this presentation and then I gave it to everyone but actually it was brilliant again for me because I hadn't done any of those things for myself for quite a while and I when I did a few of them

It just brought together everything that's been trying to come out for

like six months. I started to get clear on it. I just had you know those times, I know

you've had lots of these recently where you go in and it's just going well and even when what you've made is still quite raw or early stage you're excited about it because you know it's close to what it's getting to where you want to be and I've had a week where I've had time for that and space for that and it's just being absolutely lovely.

That was mostly last week and a bit of this week.

And then the other lovely creative thing that happened

is that my community manager Tracy came to stay for a couple of days and we had a conference. We had an in-person planning conference because we keep having zooms and we run out of time and we never get anywhere so we had a whole day and we got through everything on our list we made brilliant plans and it was really nice we ate good food

it was it was really a good it's been a good few weeks and I've enjoyed myself

that's good sounds like yeah lots a good. Sounds like, yeah, lots of different ways to get a spot up again. Yeah, it's just, I know you've been doing a bit of work on this in your group and we always approach these things in different ways which I love to see

But it's that thing we're both saying

You have to take time to do some things that are not painting. In my case, mine was very focused on like things like mind mapping or deliberately making bad paintings or using art prompt websites to give you different ideas that just trying to come up with a bunch of different ways that you might approach getting started and I probably used three or four of them myself but honestly I was just like, wow, suddenly all this creative energy came back. And I do think though that the period of being stuck was necessary.

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