I’m currently in a free course called Share the Work by Emily Jeffords which is designed to teach artists how to have the right mindset about their art, how to build a sustainable and thriving art business, and many other tips and tricks for artists trying to share their work.
I’m loving every second of it and the positivity radiating off of Emily in the videos is more contagious than the new UK strain of COVID-19. It’s awesome and I already feel like I have a better mindset about creating art. Maintaining this mindset will be the key to creating better art that I’m more confident sharing.
My problem is coming with branding. I don’t know if I even know who I am as a brand yet. I want to be able to share everything that I work on because I never stick with anything for long enough to get anywhere with a community before jumping into a new one and losing the people that may have been interested in the last subject. I want my brand to be for people who are into everything, who have a mind just as scattered and on the move as mine. I don’t like forcing a hobby for too long because then it just takes that much longer to come around again, like I’ve abused the joy that comes out of it. But this is contradictory to all advice out there for artists which is simple: find a concise brand. Don’t be scattered and all over the map with the content.
Let’s just step back and say I do this and refine my pages (pretty much just Instagram) so that they focus 90% on the digital and traditional art that I do, and maybe I post here or there when I have finished pieces in my other hobbies. This still creates a flow that jumps all over the place. Last week I was doing tons of pet portraits in a style I’ve never tried before. This weekend I did a painting in a style I’d never done before. I’m posting a second digital drawing today for a series of drawings that even my family says is totally different from anything I’ve done before. None of them look remotely similar. I cant’ stick to one thing even in just one category. So…what do I do?
At one time I thought about having a bunch of different accounts so that I could keep one hobby per page and then they would be separated so that people are less confused viewing my page. But then I would be spread thin over all those pages and it would be more stress than it’s worth to be running them. I’d end up forgetting about half of them or not using them enough for it to be worth keeping them. Plus, how many versions of elynjoccreates do I really want to be coming up with? I’m already getting dizzy.
I want more than anything to be able to live sustainably off of a creative means, it’s my dream above all dreams. I will have reached a level of happiness in my life I don’t think I could ever reach doing anything else for a full time job.
I think to start, I will go ahead and focus my feed down to just digital and traditional artworks that I’ve finished. In the future I’ll try to maintain a single style for more than a day at a time and work more on collections rather than solo pieces. I hope that this will make my feed less confusing than it definitely is right now. I’ll still sprinkle in finished projects from other hobbies but no more progress pictures and things like that. Or if I really want to share progress on another hobby I’ll share it in my stories like I see other creators do. I think that will be a great start. Eventually I’ll go back and start archiving things that don’t fit in with the new brand.
I’ll also be creating a new page on this website that will function as an online art gallery for pieces that I’ve finished so far. I hope that having this page will allow me to further organize all of my art into more clear cut categories. For example the different art styles that I tried out last week (mentioned above) would all get their own category and viewing page so everything looks more cohesive in one spot instead of mixed together.
I’m really looking forward to today’s video coming out which will talk about critiquing your own artwork to know which pieces are right to sell. I already know Snail Mail isn’t making the cut lol. I’ll be painting over that one soon. I’d also like to redo Peaches again, this time on a bigger canvas using the same type of style I was doing for the tomato piece.
Are you taking part in Emily Jefford’s Share the Work course? Let me know in the comments below. And if you’re not seriously consider checking it out!
