EXPAND Doesn’t Mean Doing More in Your Creative Business

At the beginning of this year, I chose SPACIOUSNESS as my word for the year. I wanted more room in my business. More room to create and play, but also more room to work out what I actually wanted my business to look like.

Now we’re moving into a new season and I’ve chosen a new word: EXPAND.

Except I don’t mean expand in the traditional business sense. I’m not talking about adding more services, working more hours, creating more things or filling every bit of that lovely spaciousness I worked so hard to make. For me, EXPAND means expanding the way I think about my creative business.

What else could this be?

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Laura Jane Illustrations inside Creative Pals and more recently I joined Kelli at Pink Lemonade Company for the Create & Sell challenge. Both have made me look at my art differently.

Instead of creating something, finishing it and immediately moving onto the next thing, I’m starting to ask: What else could this be? How else could I use it?

Suddenly, one piece of work doesn’t have to have one job. I created seamless patterns and realised they could become digital papers. Those digital papers could become part of a digital planner. The little illustrations I’ve been drawing could become digital stickers to use inside that planner.

I created four collage-style prompt cards as part of the challenge and started thinking about how they could become printable cards. Then I thought about cutting them out digitally, adding a little drop shadow and turning those into digital planner stickers too. One idea keeps opening a doorway into another.

I don’t need to keep creating from scratch

I think this has been one of the biggest shifts for me. As a creative person, I LOVE making things. Give me Procreate, an Apple Pencil and a new brush set and I can disappear quite happily.

The problem is that it’s very easy to keep making new things. New illustration. New collection. New idea. Ooooh, look at this thing I could make...

Meanwhile, there is already a growing pile of work sitting behind me that could become something else. Create & Sell has really made me look backwards as well as forwards and ask what I've already made and what I could pull out of the archives.

Could an old illustration become a pattern? Could a pattern become a printable? Could elements from a collection become stickers? Could something I made for one Pretty Way World work in an entirely different format?

That feels like a much more sustainable way for me to build a creative business.

Maybe SPACIOUSNESS had to come first

This is the bit I hadn't really connected until I started thinking about my word for this season. I don't think I could have chosen EXPAND at the beginning of the year because back then, I needed SPACIOUSNESS.

I needed to stop filling every available gap with something else to do. I needed room to play again and room to work out what I actually wanted. Now I have some of that room, I can see possibilities I wasn't seeing before.

EXPAND isn't about filling the space back up. It's about expanding my mind to see my business differently.

Maybe SPACIOUSNESS gave me the room I needed to EXPAND, and I'm rather excited to see where it takes me.