This weekend I was with my husband‘s family and I was asked how did I make the mental shift from being an architect to an artist.

My answer was that I was always an artist but that architecture was my detour. In fact, my entire formal education was a detour away from where I always wanted to go in my life, that is to be an artist.

When I went off to college I went pre-med because my parents wanted that. Slowly I began to shift and rebel. The first step was to switch from a chemistry major to a business major, but I still had the pre-med math and sciences. Then I graduated from college and instead of applying to either medical or dental school, I applied to architecture school.

All the while, I was pursuing various artsy hobbies such as photography, drawing, watercolor, sewing, and other crafts.

I became an architect and was diligent about completing my internship and passing the architectural registration exam, all the while I had a parallel plan in place to become a full-time artist.

At first, I did not know how I would do this and I also did not know how I wanted to make the shift, there are so many opportunities to choose from. So while I was an architect, I would just keep the thought in mind, that one day soon I would be a full-time artist. I would draw and read during my lunch breaks, I used my weekend hours to create art, and I would use my vacations to stay home and draw and paint for the five days in a row. And bask in the dream of doing this every day.

I am a driven person, so I also made a study guide for myself and actively focused on building mastery in the various areas I felt I needed to work on. During this phase of being a full-time architect and hobbyist artist, I read several books that made a profound impact on me.

They were:

The book, Art and Fear, helped me overcome my fear of going after my dream to be an artist. This book is really a mindset book and it really helped me, as you see I had encountered resistance of my goal to be an artist all of my life until I told my husband about my dream. And being the nice guy that he is and the engineer that he is, he suggested we make a five-year plan for this transition. We implemented that plan and I became an artist.

How Successful Artists Study was my go to handbook for years, see my book review here to learn more about it. And the book the The Science and Practice of Drawing is just a fantastic book in my opinion and I am so thankful to the Amazon algorithms for suggesting it to me. I have read this book multiple times it is just so good. See my review here.

Being an artist is not an easy career. There are no laid out paths to follow and there are as many ways to make a living as an artist as there are types of art. Because of this you really need to find your own way by being willing to explore and see what works. With this in mind, another book that still inspires me to keep aiming for artistic excellence is Mastery by Robert Greene. This book is a testament to every exemplary artist, no matter the medium, that dedication and concentrated effort at mastering a skill is the way to excellence in art.

I am so happy that I did make the transition to art full-time. It has not been easy and there have been many stressful days when I did not know where to focus, however I am very happy that I persevered and have always continued to try to improve my ability to express the world I love and share beauty with you.