A Day in the Life

I know I've been very remiss with this blog over the years - the last entry was back in April 2022! So I'm going to try to pull my socks up and contribute a little something more regularly in future. I thought I'd kick things off by offering a bit of an insight into what life's like as a professional artist, by way of describing a typical work day here at Rob Wigham Watercolours!
The first thing to know about Sharon and I is that as far as possible, we don't do anything before two coffees in bed. We take this to extremes and are quite prepared to set our alarm for a ridiculously early start in order to do coffee time. Most days, though, unless we need to, we don't set an alarm - we always wake sometime around 7-ish anyway!
After coffee I'll get up and roll into work, which in my case is only about 10 metres away in our studio. In the studio are two tall desks - one each. Mine is equipped with daylight lighting that I can pull around as needed, and that's where I paint. Because our studio is right next to our kitchen and living room, I like to keep the desks tidy, so I come in to a clean desk most mornings, and set up from there. If there's a painting in progress I'll set the board up on my desk and get into the mood by staring at it, and the sketches for it, for a while. Very quickly I find that I need to get going and I'm all fired up to paint!
You might think that I spend all my time painting, but you'd be wrong. For a start, I find that because I don't concentrate enough on my posture while painting bent over my desk (I always stand to paint), a long day of painting tends to leave me pretty sore. Also, painting new work is only a part of our business; around half of my time, and pretty much all of Sharon's, goes into producing prints to resupply the shops and galleries where our prints are stocked and doing the actual restocking of galleries. So quite often we'll spend the day, or at least much of it, producing prints.
We produce every part of our prints ourselves, at home. It takes me almost a day's work to produce a new print from one of my paintings - a process which I'll describe in more detail sometime here - but once it's mastered and stored, control of it hands over to Sharon. Her days are spent keeping up with orders and shop sales, printing with our own giclee printer (a special printer that prints in paint rather than ink, thereby producing a lightfast print that won't fade) and cutting the mounts needed for our 4 sizes of prints, as well as original paintings. Once the mounts are ready and the prints produced, I 'mount' the prints squarely within the aperture. That's a slow business, aligning the prints by eye to make sure they're central and level, then securely taped in place. The prints then pass back to Sharon, who sticks the mounts together to make a rigid product and then we come together to wrap the print in its packaging and label it. We also package and send off any mail orders and of course frame any prints or paintings that needs framing from the stock of frames we keep in our office.. So yes, we like to say that we spend many of our working days 'cutting things out and sticking them down!'
Generally I try to mix up painting and doing prints, which makes for a bit of variety. I'm a morning person, so I like to do creative stuff like pulling sketches together for new paintings and painting in that time. After about 4 or 5 hours of that I tend to stop and clear up my desk. Our collie dog knows what that means, and Sharon and I always break during the early afternoon for a long walk - we're lucky enough to be surrounded by woodland walks where we live, so we can walk straight from the house. When we come back, I'll usually switch to mounting whatever prints are needed, although if I'm up against deadlines or want to do more new work, I'll sometimes paint all day.
Generally we both finish work by about 5 o'clock, but there are occasions that we have to work much later. We both remember with a shudder coming in after a day off in the garden to find a wholesale order for around 30 new prints needed urgently by the next day. Reacting to unrealistic timescales like that is just the sort of thing that has to happen when you work for yourselves!
Our favourite working days, though, are sketching days which we do whenever the weather's good and we can afford the time. On those days we pack a picnic, walking boots and the dog, and head out into the sunshine. I get to spend the day looking for the best views in our area (very often suggested by Sharon!) and then sketching them, making enough colour and detail notes to myself that I can go home and paint the view at home. All three of us love those days, walking, sketching and picnicking in the sunshine!
​So there we go - hopefully that gives you an idea of how we spend our working days! If you liked reading about this, please let me know! Cheers for now, Rob.