Nobody warned me.

I mean, sure, they warned me about some things. They called it “artist probs”. They warned me that acrylic paint dries faster than you think. They warned me that galleries take fifty percent. They warned me that “exposure” doesn’t pay the electric bill.

But nobody, not one single person, sat me down and said, “Sheila. There will come a day when you spend six hours trying to make your website look….average.”

Hey. It’s fine. I’m fine. And my footer is finally sexy. It used to just say “powered by Squarespace”. ugh.

Six. hours.

Y’all, I am a woman who has taught art in Italy. (I said no, with tears, to an all expenses paid trip - and then some - to Italy this year. In fact, I should be there right now. But the Lord was clear that I was to be here for our church’s tent crusade outreach). I have art hanging in every state in this nation and in well over two-thirds of all the countries on earth. I have stood before rooms full of hundreds of women and spoken things that made them cry the good kind of tears.

And yet, I was today years old when I learned what the |← button does in Squarespace. (It aligns things to the center. In case you were wondering. That’s all it does.)

Here is a partial list of jobs I did not know I had when I decided to become a working artist:

Web designer. Not the fun kind, where you have opinions about fonts and sip coffee while choosing color palettes. The kind where you say “how do I make this #@##$$% box wider”.

SEO specialist. Apparently Google needs to know who I am and what I do, and it will not simply take my word for it. I have to tell it. In a special way. In a special place. That I had to find first.

Copywriter. For every. single. product. “Original Painting, 22x30, Rainbow Color Study 6.” That’s not a title, that’s a filing system. And yet — there it sat. Representing me. To the world.

E-commerce manager. Did you know you can have a shop full of sold-out items and just… leave them there? Apparently I did this. Apparently I did this for a while. A long while. Nothing says thriving art business like a storefront where half the inventory is unavailable.

Brand strategist. My site title, until approximately this afternoon, read: “Sheila Atchley | Inspire & Empower Today.” I did not write that. I do not know who wrote that. It sounds like a LinkedIn profile for someone’s motivational speaking, slightly overweight uncle. It is gone now. We don’t talk about it.

IT support. For myself. Which is the loneliest kind.

*I am also my own photographer…which deserves a nice leather camera bag.*

The thing is, and I mean this with my whole (shot to hell, right this second) nervous system: it’s worth it.

All of it. The backend navigation and the squished header text and the seventeen attempts to drag a category into a different order using a MacBook trackpad that did not want to cooperate. Worth it.

Because on the other side of all that inglamorous, un-Instagrammable labor is a place on the internet that is mine. It tells the truth about the work and the story behind the work, it invites the right people in, it reflects something of what I actually believe about beauty and grace and the crazy of making things.

Nobody sees the back end. That’s rather the point of a back end.

But you make it beautiful anyway, for the same reason you hem the slip even though it doesn’t show, the same reason you sign the back of the canvas, the same reason you refuse to use bad grammar in text messages.

Because you’re that kind of woman. Because beauty is a practice, not a performance. Because how I do some things, is eventually how I do all things.

Also because AI can answer questions literally all day, every day.

The Glamour of Being an Artist {…that nobody tells you about…}

Art, As a “Tool in the Toolbox”

Something New is Coming! {Salt and Light is being re-released}