Just finished another longer drawing. And I want to streamline my outreach a bit.
I should start measuring the hours I’m putting into these. It’s A4 sized, but I’ve spent substantial time on the details. I think I’m OK with taking a lot of time – it means less updates, but at the end, it’s the quality that matters. Working slow is just kinda my thing.
Then it actually kinda fits well to show work-in-progress steps on my Patreon art page. It means more updates there, but also that I can show stuff without promising results to too big of an audience… some pictures might just not work out after all. I will have to rework the page there a bit in the coming weeks, so it’s an advantage there that it’s not big. Maybe remove some higher possible pledges and promises of content, but make the basic promise more clear. I’ll stick to the lottery idea – but have to create more for that.
Detail view: Small birch offshoot.
Detail view: Birch trees.
Also getting comfortable with my … let’s call it media strategy. My still relatively new Instagram art spot seems to work well with outreach – the advantage over Facebook and such is that a lot of new people see the content, not just old friends. Still a long way to go here (just over 100 followers currently).
I mentioned earlier that I’m trying a Reddit art profile. I would prefer it to all others – Reddit is more open, and friendly to creators. And that also is true for the community. But still they have to change stuff to make it work … and there is some resistance by users to the changes. It seems thought it’s moving in the right way (recently they added “original-content” tags for some subs), so I’ll stick to it. I just don’t trust Twitter/Instagram and Facebook with their secretive algorithms. Loish (an artist really rocking at social media) figures they tend to block outgoing links and Patreon stuff on Facebook. Maybe not yet on Instagram – but I just find it annoying not to know what goes on – and giving control over my content to them.
Detail view: Phoenix.
Detail View of Forest Ink Drawing: Mushrooms.
So maybe there will be better alternatives coming around – there is still room for adjustments. It would be nice to reduce the amount of publishing – right now it takes hours to make all previews (ever site wants different formats) and coming up with tags and all of this. All part of the job. But preferably I would like to spend that time making art.