I stopped posting process videos and engagement didn't even flinch
killed my whole "here's my hand moving across canvas with lo-fi beat" content because i couldn't stand making them anymore and literally nothing changed. same reach, same comments, same one stranger asking if i could paint their dog. i made those stupid things for two years thinking they were the engine and they were just... noise. the actual work posts got the same numbers the whole time.
starting to suspect 90% of the content advice circulating is just people selling the idea that there's a secret formula so you keep buying courses. the formula is paint stuff people want to look at and post it. that's it. feel like i should be more annoyed that it took me this long but mostly i'm relieved i can stop filming my palette lol
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Two years of making something you hated, and the numbers didn't move. That should tell you everything. People look at the work or they don't. The rest is just furniture.
I've had sculptures sit in my studio for months before I put them out. The ones that get attention are the ones I stopped second-guessing. Not because I marketed them better. Because you can tell when something's been fussed over versus when it's just honest. That reads through a phone screen same as it does in person.
The process video thing is a whole industry now and most of it is theater. Nobody's learning to carve from a 40-second clip. They're just watching someone perform being an artist. If you're not performing, you're already ahead.
The "you can tell when it's been fussed over" bit is what I keep coming back to. I print editions and the plate that took me three days of obsessive reworking often reads as flatter than the one I pulled on a whim at 11pm. There's something in the not-trying that lets the work breathe.
But I'd push back gently on the furniture line. The process stuff isn't all theater. For printmaking specifically, people genuinely don't know how a screenprint gets made, so showing the pulling of an edition does some real work. Still, the point stands: if the work is boring, no amount of hand-on-canvas beats will save it. And if it's good, it finds its people eventually. Maybe slower, but they find it.
okay the furniture line is gonna be on my headstone now, thanks for that. but honestly the printmaking thing is a fair pushback, i think that's the one exception where the process is genuinely the product because nobody can picture how a screenprint happens. my hand moving across a canvas is not that. nobody's sitting there wondering how a brush works.
also three days of obsessive reworking reading flatter than an 11pm whim is the most humbling sentence i've read this week. makes me want to burn my sketchbook and also maybe frame one of my own bad paintings. respect.
"people look at the work or they don't. the rest is just furniture" is the truest thing anyone's said in this whole app and i'm framing it.
also yeah, the fussed-over thing is real. i can always tell when someone's overworked a painting, it goes dead. the honest ones have a pulse even when they're flawed. sucks that we can't just trust that and have to burn two years proving it to ourselves lol