Hey there and welcome to this savvy painter podcast. I am your host, Ann Trees Wood. I'm a painter,

master coach, and the founder of Savvy Painter Growth Studio. So today we are kicking off a special

series on something that I have been developing behind the scenes for a while now. It's something

that I call the create spiral. And I think of it as a

growth path for artists. It's this framework that I'm using inside Gros Studio and within my

private coaching to help artists understand why they get stuck, where they are in their process, and how to move

forward easily, simply, without shame, without any drama. So here's what got me thinking about

this is I think we're all familiar with downward spirals where we just get a thought in our head

and we just start spiraling, adding to it, and pretty soon we're just feeling pretty gross.

So this spiral, the create spiral, I think of it as that growth path for artists.

It's an upward spiral. So it includes

some of the things that we do anyway, but I organize them and reframe them so that they create a

positive momentum in your art practice. Because here's the thing. And I hope this doesn't sound

too obvious, but it's the obvious things that we so often

overlook. But growth isn't linear. And if you've ever felt like you've lost momentum or you don't

even know what you want to paint anymore, it doesn't mean that you're broken. It just means that you're in a very specific

part of this spiral. So this create spiral, it repeats. It's a cycle that we move through as we go

from being a beginning painter to an established artist and on towards mastery. So it's just something that we

continually move through. And today I want to talk about the first phase of it, which is

curiosity. So if you're in this phase, you might hear yourself thinking things like, I don't know what I want to

paint right now or everything just feels kind of blah. Sometimes it shows up with like, I don't know

where I want to take this series. You may have been working on something for a while. When you started it,

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