I’m already struggling with the lack of light as we hurtle towards winter. Between this and other life stuff my productivity has been absolutely rubbish lately. As the days get shorter, I find I’m having to get very intentional about time in the “studio”.

I’m not at all a morning person so at the moment my main goal is to aim to get up around sunrise to maximise my daylight hours. This is a real struggle for me and I’m not at all sure I’ll manage it so I’ve come up with a couple of strategies:

• We’ve moved the heater closer to the bed so I can turn it on from bed in the morning. I’ll set an alarm for 6am to turn it on and go back to sleep until 8:30.
• I’ve noticed that if I leave it too long between painting sessions, I either become very antsy to get back to it or at the other extreme, I can become very complacent about it. When the latter happens, I’ve found a beautifully simple silver bullet. If I pull out the pieces in progress and leave them out so I can look at them throughout the day I instantly get excited about getting stuck into them again.
• When the time comes when even the light during the day isn’t good enough for too many days in a row, I might get one of those fancy natural daylight lamps. I used to scoff at these as a newbie artist but after attempting to paint with regular light bulbs last winter, I’m a convert. I’d happily paint away with what I thought was a lovely shade of grey then take the painting outside into natural daylight to take some photos, only to find that it was a strange and not altogether pleasant shade of pale green!

What are your winter time survival strategies?