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I've been spending so much time on short-form video lately, mainly Reels for Instagram. But I see so many people having huge success on YouTube Shorts and I'm wondering if I should pivot? It feels like a totally different beast. The content that does okay on Reels feels too polished for Shorts sometimes, if that makes sense? Has anyone found a good strategy for both, or do you focus on one platform? My engagement is okay on Reels, but nothing like what I see some people getting on Shorts. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong creators. It's hard to tell what's real and what's just a lucky spike.

I posted a reel of me cutting smalti, the satisfying little clinks, and it did what those do, forty-something thousand views. Nice dopamine hit. But the person who actually commissioned a piece from me this month saw a single still photo I'd pinned to my profile months ago, from an old slow project. No sound, no motion, just a finished panel leaning against a wall. I'm not saying the reels are worthless. They bring eyes, they bring algorithm points, whatever those are worth. But I've stopped treating them like the real marketing. The real marketing is the archive of finished work that sits there quietly while I sleep. The video is the party, the portfolio is the marriage. Also the reel took me two days to edit and the photo took me thirty seconds. I keep having to remind myself of that ratio.

I made a short reel on my phone recently and shared it on Instagram. A little later, I realized I wanted it on Facebook too, so I had to upload it all over again. It got me wondering if there's a better way to publish the same reel to both platforms without doing everything twice. I've seen Instagram's cross-posting option, but it doesn't always seem to appear. Is there a reliable workflow that works consistently? I'm also curious whether using Instagram's cross-posting changes how a reel performs on Facebook or Instagram compared to uploading it separately to each platform.

Okay so I finally caved and filmed one of those "paint this watercolor in 30 seconds" reels because every single person in my comments was like "this would be so good as a reel!!!" and the algorithm had basically stopped showing my work to anyone. 4.2k views. My actual finished paintings get like 30-40 likes on a good day. And I just feel weird about it. Like, great, that many people watched paint dry in fast motion. But did a single one of them buy anything? Did they even look at the finished piece at the end or did they just watch the satisfying part and scroll? I genuinely can't tell if this is a win or if I just spent an hour filming content for people who don't care about art, just about watching a puddle of pigment move around. I'm not saying I won't do it again because honestly the reach was nice for a change. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm optimizing for the wrong audience. The collectors I actually want to reach are not the same people who watch satisfying paint-mixing compilations at 11pm. Or maybe they are?? I have no idea. Someone tell me it's not just me feeling this.

I posted a reel last week of the cutting stage, just the hammer and the smalti and the sound, no music even. Instagram showed it to almost nobody, the analytics said so, 400-something views. I nearly didn't bother checking the messages. Two different gallery people had written to ask about a show. I keep having to relearn this. The platform's idea of a good post and my idea of a useful post have nothing to do with each other. The algorithm wants the thing that keeps people scrolling. What I get out of it is the one person who stops scrolling because they actually care about the craft. That person doesn't need the reel to perform. They just need to see it once, at the right moment. I've stopped optimizing. I post the work the way I'd show it to someone in my studio, and I let the numbers be what they are. The views that matter are the ones that write back.

Accidentally archived the reel that had 200k views and something like 12k saves. Panicked for an hour. Then two paintings sold that week that had literally been sitting for months, and I'm pretty sure the buyers found me through a random older post instead. I'm not saying the algorithm is fake or whatever. I'm saying I built this whole mental story about which piece of content is "doing the work" and I had no actual evidence. The reel was king, I decided. It was not king. It was just loud. Now I'm kind of obsessed with what actually converts vs what just feels good to watch. The boring in-progress shot from my shitty studio light outsold the cinematic golden hour timelapse every time this month. Every time. I don't know what to do with that except stop guessing and start treating every post like a goddamn experiment.

I spent all last year trying to crack the algorithm. Filming my process with proper lighting. Voiceovers about the "meaning behind the work." Scheduling posts at optimal times. The reel that got me actual sales? Me, 11pm, exhausted, propping a half-finished painting against a wall in bad kitchen light, no audio, just a 5-second clip of me adding charcoal lines. Caption: "this isn't working yet but I like it." That's it. 14k views. Two commissions. I don't know what to do with that information. It makes me want to stop trying at all, which is probably not the takeaway, but also maybe it is?

Every week a gallery or a fellow painter tells me I have to show more of the work in motion. The brush going down, the glazing, the palette. And I get it, people watch that stuff. But there is a reason I stopped filming my hand a few years ago and it's not laziness. When I film myself painting, I paint for the camera. Not consciously. But the hand becomes a performer. The strokes get more theatrical, the pauses disappear, the whole thing becomes a demonstration of painting instead of painting. That's not the same activity. I spent my thirties unlearning performing, I'm not going to spend my fifties picking it back up for a views count. The strange part is the numbers agree with me. My studio shots, the finished work, even the messy shelf where I keep my mediums, those posts do fine. Steady. Modest. The kind of engagement that actually brought me two commissions this year. And when I did post a reel a few months ago, close on the palette, the reach was higher and the inquiries were zero. People want to watch the paint move, they don't want to buy the painting. That tells me something. I'm not saying nobody should show process. Go ahead, it works for plenty of people. I just think some of us are better served by being a bit less available. The mystery of how it gets made used to be part of the value.

took down a reel that hit 12k views the other day. it was me assembling a torn-paper piece, sped up, and it got the biggest reach i've had in months. and the comments were full of people asking for the finished piece and the story behind it and i just... couldn't. because the piece was about my brother and i wasn't ready to hand that to strangers holding phones at 2am. so i deleted it. and i've been second-guessing it all week because that's the whole game right, you're supposed to chase the reach. but i made the thing for me. the sharing part was the part i never wanted. not posting the process anymore. or at least not that one. some things stay in the studio, even if the algorithm would've loved them.

so i did the thing everyone says you have to do. i made reels for six months straight. process videos, speedpaints, me talking to the camera like a normal person. gave it the real college try. one commission. from a girl i already knew irl. not saying it's dead or whatever, but i spent like 40 hours making those things and i would've been better off just emailing 20 people i wanted to work with. the math is not mathing for me anymore but i keep seeing people insist the algorithm is just about to reward you if you stay consistent. feels like a cope at this point. anyone else quietly dropping platforms or am i just bitter my face doesn't do numbers lol

Is anyone else finding it harder to reach collectors on Instagram lately? I don't mind creating reels, but it feels like every few months the platform changes what it rewards. What's actually working for artists right now?

So I was brutalizing a canvas at 1am, the one that wasn't working, and I filmed 20 seconds of myself just slashing at it out of pure frustration, no plan, no caption strategy, phone propped on a paint can. Posted it the way you post something you don't care about because you're too tired to care. 106k views. My best planned post this month did 800. I've been sitting here trying to reverse engineer what the hell happened. Was it the rawness? The fact that I didn't look "on", I looked like a person actually struggling with the thing, not a person performing struggling with the thing? The lighting was garbage. I had no ring light. I genuinely look like a raccoon in it. It's making me question every polished thing I've put out. Like do people smell the production the way dogs smell fear. The comment section was full of people just... being honest about their own blocked creative work. Nobody even asked about the painting. It wasn't about the art. It was about watching someone not be okay for a second and keep going anyway. Anyway now everything I post feels fake in comparison and I hate that. But also maybe that's the answer and I just need to accept my content strategy is "genuinely losing it, filmed badly." 😭

I keep going round in circles on this. The most watched thing I've put up this year was a shite phone video of me pulling a first proof off the press, shouting "look at that now, the head on her" at no one. Four hundred thousand views, sure. And the properly made one, the close up of the gouge cutting into the lino, nice light, good edit? Two hundred odd and mostly my mother. Not complaining, it paid for ink. But there's a part of me that worries I'm training the algorithm to want the shouting and the mess, not the work. Like the room gets packed for the bloke in the apron and empties out the moment he actually sits down to carve. I don't know what the answer is. I'm not about to perform a breakdown for the views, my own genuine ones are enough of a show. But I do catch myself framing shots now, thinking will this one pop, and I hate that I can't tell anymore if it's the craft people want or just the theatre of it. Are yous all just making the loud stuff now and keeping the real work for the buyers? Or have you found a way to make the quiet post land too?

My granddaughter set up the phone to catch me cutting scraps for a new piece the other day, and I watched it back and just sat there a minute. That woman in the video, she cuts like she's sure about something. Steady. I don't feel that way when I'm doing it, I feel my way in, hold the fabric up, turn it, talk to it sometimes. But the camera smoothed all that out. Made it look like I knew what I was doing. The comments ate it up. "So methodical," one girl said. Baby, that was the first take. I was working out the quilt as I went and it landed as a plan. It's a funny thing about this internet. The mess is the part nobody sees, and the part that reads as talent is usually just the part that got edited down. I'm not mad at it. But I do think about all the young ones watching that and thinking they're supposed to have it figured out at the cutting table. Lord, no. The figuring comes later, if it comes at all.

Made a vase that came out of the kiln looking like a sad potato with a neck. Warped, blistered, whole thing leaning like it had been drinking. I was so annoyed I filmed it for like 4 seconds just to vent to my group chat, posted it onto tiktok as a joke, didn't even edit it. That thing has 200k views and I sold three pieces because of it. Meanwhile the pieces I spent actual weeks on, perfect glaze, beautiful lighting, those get me maybe 40 likes each. I don't know what to do with this information. Do I just... make more sad potatoes on purpose? That feels like cheating. But also rent is due and the sad potato paid it.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

My daughter convinced me to post a short video of me roughing out a block of limestone. No finished piece, no music, just the sound of the chisel and my hands doing what they've done for thirty years. It got forty-some thousand views and three commission inquiries. The carefully lit photos of finished work I post get maybe two hundred. I don't fully understand it and I don't trust it. But it made me think most people online don't want to see the art. They want to see the labor. The sweat and the noise and the hours. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just a different thing than I thought I was selling.

We've been trying to get more structured with our Instagram Reels. For ages, it felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know? Lots of effort, not much to show for it. But this past week, we finally had a sequence of three Reels focusing on a step-by-step process for one of our smaller products just… take off. Like, double the engagement we usually get on any given post, and a noticeable bump in traffic to that product page too. It’s not a huge viral moment, but for us, it feels like a breakthrough after so much trial and error. Makes all the late evenings worth it, mostly! 🙂

I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like. I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess. Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.

My gallery's new person keeps asking for process content. Behind the scenes, time-lapse, work in progress. I understand the logic, short clips of me scraping back layers get ten times the reach of the finished work. The problem is the work itself. A large painting of mine sits on the wall for weeks between sessions because oil and cold wax needs to cure before I can build the next layer. There is nothing cinematic about watching me wait. I could film myself scraping and smearing and make it look dynamic, but that would be a lie about how it actually happens, and I am not interested in performing a fake version of my own work for the algorithm. I did a ten second reel of the palette knife going through wet wax last week because I felt I had to. It looked great. It is the least honest thing I have done in years. The finished painting, the one that matters, will not be ready until March and nobody will watch it dry. Am I wrong to resist this? Sometimes I think the medium itself is becoming the enemy of the marketing. Then I remind myself I did not spend twenty five years learning to layer oil so I could make satisfying looped videos about it.