Hey there, welcome back to the Savy Painter Podcast.

I am your host, Antriese Wood, and we are continuing our series on the Create Spiral,

which is a growth path for artists.

It's a way of understanding your creative process that accounts for the real emotions, cycles, and struggles

that we face as artists. So this is something that I have been developing behind the scenes,

and I am using the word create as an acronym. So we have curiosity, resistance, exploration, alignment, trust,

and expansion. So that makes this a six-part series, and this is number four out of six.

If you haven't heard the other episodes, that's okay. You can go back and listen to them later.

They are not dependent on each other.

This is a spiral that I have been thinking a lot about lately.

And it's something that I think we enter in and out of all the time.

But I kind of wanted to put it into sort of like a framework so that it'd be

easier for you to see and to recognize when you are in different phases of this.

So today, we're going to talk about a phase that I think often surprises people, and that is

alignment. This is when things start to click.

It's when your process is starting to feel really steady. You're not second guessing every move.

And maybe for the first time in a long time, you're feeling like yourself in the studio.

But at the same time, it feels a little bit off.

So let's talk about it.

Alignment, I think, is what happens when all of the experimenting, the resistance, and wondering finally begins to settle.

You're making work that feels, well, aligns.

You're not chasing every shiny idea or questioning every single brushstroke.

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