Watched the numbers drop when I showed the mess behind the work
Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels.
Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it.
The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost.
But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.
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I get why the numbers hurt, but honestly I think you traded volume for something better. The engagement dropping by a third sounds bad until you look at what it dropped down to. People asking about joints and weld cracking are actually going to remember your work. Someone double-tapping a finished slab is gone in half a second.
I paint, soft pastel portraits, and I used to post only the final piece, all clean and finished. When I started throwing in the failed attempts, the sketches I scraped off, the same nose I redrew eleven times, my numbers dipped too. But the comments changed completely. People stopped saying "beautiful" and started asking about the paper, the color layering, why I chose one fixative over the other. Those are the conversations that taught me things.
The finished piece is the bait. The mess is where people actually decide if they trust you. I'd rather have a third less reflex and keep the ones who care.
okay but the eleven-times nose is so real haha. my version is this window I keep painting, I've done it like thirty times and I still post every single iteration even when one comes out genuinely bad. numbers dip every time and then every now and then someone comments asking about how I handled the light on the same frame in a different way and it makes the whole thing worth it.
I think there's also something about the people who stay being the ones who come BACK. like the finished piece pulls a stranger, but the mess pulls somebody who now recognizes your name. that's a different kind of currency and honestly I'd rather have it.
do you find the failed ones harder to post or the boring repetitive ones? for me the boring is worse, the failures at least have drama haha
Thirty times on the same window. That's not stubbornness, that's knowing the difference between repetition and finding it. Most people quit at attempt four and call it done.
You're right about the ones who come back. That's the whole trade. A stranger likes the finished piece once and moves on. The person who watched you grind through thirty versions of a window, they'll remember your name next time. That's a real audience, just a smaller one. I'll take it.
The eleven-times nose gets me. You know what's worse than redoing it that many times? The version that finally works is barely different from the one you scraped at attempt three. Nobody sees that part, that it was always almost there.
That window thing though, thirty iterations, that's not stubbornness, that's just learning the material. Pastel's unforgiving in its own way. Stone's the same, you can't erase, you only cut away more. Thirty windows teaches you things eleven noses can't.
You're right that the comments changed. That's the part I keep coming back to. The people who stuck around ask better questions than anyone who liked the clean shots ever did. Hard to call that a loss.