an artist on social media needs to...

…create actual art as well as post art on their chosen platforms. I figured that live-streaming the process, that is recording the painting part of art making and sharing it on social media in real time, does both of those things simultaneously and allows me to be both economical with my time and generous with it. So I’ve set up a duel streaming system where I paint live in my studio while I record and post the session live on social media and anyone watching can interact in the comments section. I can do this via some apps which i’ve purchased and am learning how to use, and in a way those apps are like what galleries do - they are part of the “middle man” - that place between the artist and the public - that place where people gather and experience. That other place, the gallery, is also important because you can’t see artwork as it really is on social media, and art is an important experience in real life.

Social media allows artists have more opportunity and control over their own exposure than they’ve ever had before, and that’s a good thing I think.

This is a very interesting time for artists.

my live painting on twitch

my live painting on YouTube

I’m pRetty happy with my efforts…

I’ve spent the best part of last week (the first week of the school holidays) working on my website which was what I planned to do. Now that I’ve done that I can put extra effort into painting things that will build my store as well as work on other commitments, like commissions and preparing upcoming workshop/courses. My ongoing plan is to structure my days/weeks into a work schedule and stick to it…and that’s it! That’s my exciting project of the moment - building a well structured, time-managed-organised-existence to create in.

sincerely,

Cat

Today i met one of the locals…

…on a walk with the little bitch Bubbles, and then I went home and painted him for a live stream on Twitch.
I’ve attempted to embed the link to the video in the word “process” situated below my finished painting. If it works I’ll be happy but as I write this I realise that it’ll only work for 2 weeks because the twitch app deletes videos after 2 weeks unless you manually highlight them but if I do that after posting this it’ll be a new link I suppose…which I can tweak later if I remember.


One of the locals

Watch the process

When i first started pOsting on redbubble…

13 years ago I could only make the card products. It took me a while (because I was so new to computer speak), but after much frustration I discovered that my files were too small for creating any other products, so I invested in a decent camera.

Then it took me a while to figure out how to use that and set the image resolution to large.
Since then redbubble has introduced a plethora of new and wonderful products to put artwork on and some of them I couldn’t work out how to fill with an image when I could see that other artists were filling them and mine were not. Yesterday I discovered “resizing”, where you rework the dimensions of the photo files to fit the template snd I can now fill them. Yay!

I’ve been in this art…

…thing for a long time. Since the 1980s I’ve been creating and selling some kind of art work or service. My most recent endeavour has been tutoring/teaching my own and other aspects of the craft at a local art school and have been fortunate enough to have received my own training from an expert in this field and for that I am deeply grateful.
My next project (apart from actual art projects and ongoing tutoring commitments and skill building), is to strengthen my social media presence, work on building my website and create some kind of coherence between all of my accounts and projects so I can work more efficiently. I have the tools and now I need to learn how to best use them.

So this is the beginning of that ^^^