Affordable creative mentorship offers a diverse array of experiences to nurture your artistic growth, like a sample platter of yummy creative experiments. 🥙 (Let me explain.)

It’s when you’re at a point of artistic self-discovery, eager to explore different approaches to your career without breaking the bank.

And the best part? Creative coaching is ✨ free. ✨

The disclaimer: free is great for discovery. It’s not-so-great for focused learning. Eventually, it’ll behoove you to invest in focused learning in your artistic craft, whether for the art itself or for the path to become a full-time artist in the way that makes sense to you.

But this is for the *beginning-of-my-creative-path-and-eager-to-try-all-the-things-things* girlies.

While creativity coaching programs can be valuable, let’s face it – they can get expensive (and it’s hard to distinguish a good coach from an okay one).

So when you’re just starting out, we’re focusing on how much we can do for free so we have time for free experimentation and play. It’s your sample platter. It’s self-directed learning that should let you try a few things, fail at them, and try the next. This helps you discover what really resonates with you before investing in more specialized training (which will be just as helpful).

Creative Coaching: AKA, Free Ways to Carve Your Creative Career

Artist development resources encompass a wide range of materials available both online and offline that can help you grow as a creative, often at little to no cost!

So… what are these methods?

1. YouTube University

Free college? Yes, please. YouTube University is a space where you can learn from the comfort of your comfy couch, the fast-paced kitchen, or heck, even your daily morning walk!

YouTube is amazing for beginner creatives looking to figure out what the heck they want to do with their careers. This is for the creative who knows what they want to do as their full-time job (singing, pottery, painting, dancing, whichever art form they feel called to) but needs a way to figure out how to monetize it.

It’s easy to find an answer on YouTube, but it’s not always easy to find a good answer.

So, here are a few tips:

❥ Browse through 1 topic until you find a creator you love, and binge-watch their channel

❥ Create a themed playlist for each of the skills you want to learn, i.e. SEO, starting an Etsy shop

❥ Find an online course curriculum online and search in each module title in YouTube to BYOC (build-your-own-course)

The goal of these free resources is to provide artistic inspiration and help you discover your creative path to pursue your artistry full-time!

2. Local Artistic Communities

While online resources are fantastic, don’t overlook the power of local artistic communities — and ones that aren’t necessarily in your craft, either!

Think about vision board parties, pottery, crafting, candle-making, anything to tickle your creative muscles in your physical location. Because let’s be honest, being an artist can get lonely, so this is a great way to remember that you’re not alone. In fact, there are a lot of people around you who love doing creative things, too.

This might not feel like direct coaching, but it can offer creative block solutions (which, by the way, I don’t believe creative blocks are a thing. 😉)

After all, how does making candles translate into learning how to be a full-time singer-songwriter? Well, it doesn’t, directly. But indirectly, it helps you learn process, batching, creating something for yourself.

Now, a lot of these might cost some money. So how can you find some for free? Explore co-ops, events at local markets, and events on Eventbrite. Or, pool some resources with your friends and split the costs for something low-cost (a cute alternative to something free).

3. Workshops, Webinars & Free Facebook Groups

You might have already seen this — a creator offers a free webinar, mini-course, or workshop to get you on their email list. The quality may vary (it’s free, after all), but remember that free creative coaching is all about sampling different “flavors” to find what suits your palate to embark on your creative path.

And in fact, even if a webinar doesn’t give you amazing results, you can still get a taste of what it might be like to, say, pursue a career as a VA so you can get a remote job. Or, start a blog (like I did!) so you can forge a personal brand connected to your art.

A lot of creators also have free Facebook groups that you can join to learn more and have a free community. I remember Freelancing Females helped me so much when I started my freelance digital marketing career. I asked questions about pricing, had help creating service packages, and learned from other people’s questions.

I’ve gotten so much value from this totally free community.

Maximizing *Free* Creative Coaching

Now that we’ve explored various sources of free creative coaching, let’s go a little deeper. It’s great to find free coaching, as long as you have a longer-term strategy with it.

Use Digital Marketing Lessons Towards Your Creative Career

As a creative professional, you might not immediately see the connection between digital marketing and your artistic pursuits. However, mastering some basic digital marketing skills can be a game-changer for your creative career.

Many creatives find that they have a natural aptitude for digital marketing, making it a great side gig or even a full-time career option. But beyond that, the tools and strategies you learn can be directly applied to promote your own creative work.

Here are some digital marketing jobs that most creatives can naturally flourish at:

• Social media management
• Blog writing
• Squarespace website template creation and design
• YouTube video editing
• Community management
• Copywriter (web copy, short-form, UX)

Use Digital Accountability Buddies via Body-Doubling

Digital accountability buddies are such a key piece for staying accountable for free. People literally pay apps to host Zoom calls to hold each other accountable – so why not do that for free?

A huge part of using digital accountability buddies is through body-doubling, where you and a friend are co-working on a Facetime or Zoom call. It holds you both accountable, and feels like you’re in a virtual office with your best friend!

Some tips for this:

• Use a Pomodoro Timer. This is a timer that’s 25 minutes on, and 5 minutes off. It can be nice for when it’s difficult to get into the flow of work and need little stints of work.
• Set limits. Time limits, goal limits, boundaries. These will all help you focus focus focus. There’s nothing that will make your work take longer than knowing you have from 9-5pm to work.
• Set goals at the beginning and check in at the end. Let your accountability buddy know at the beginning of your meeting what your goals are, and check back in at the end to see how far you came.

Gamify Your Productivity Days

This creative motivation technique is simple: turn your creative tasks and learning goals into a game! This is especially helpful when you have a lot of booooring things to do that you need to get done but you keep pushing off. You can do this in a bunch of different ways:

• Create a point system for completing different activities, set up “levels” to work through, or establish “quests” for learning new skills. This is a great video on how to gamify your freelancing!
• Give yourself time limits. This is a lot like the body-doubling — give yourself specific time limits (i.e. 4 hours a day) or timeframes (6am-12pm working) and see how much you can get done within it.

Join the Violet Gaze Creative Community

If you’re an artist looking to pursue a full-time creative career, come follow along here on the blog and on my YouTube channel! Being an artist can feel lonely, but here, you’re not. 🌈🥰🙌