Alternative social media: starting a Patreon
written on 6 june 2023 and sent as a newsletter
The short and sweet
I’m releasing my Patreon! You can find me over there for monthly quality updates showing my sketchbook, painting process, exclusive art sales and (for some of you) maybe most important of all tutorials. I received so many questions about those, and now they’re finally here. Go check it out, I spent a lot of love on this one and I believe this really is the way forward for any self-employed artist :-)
The long and packed
Two months ago I did a little experiment. As you might know being a full time artist doesn’t mean you’re creating all the time. It also means you’re communicating with clients, doing your bookkeeping, planning projects and oh yeah, marketing.
For me, marketing means putting my work on social media like Instagram and Youtube to be seen. It used to be enough to upload a photo of a new work or sketch every few days. I’d get a lot of responses by people that liked it, grew my ‘following’ organically and it was a pretty nice way to stay connected and see the growth.
Nowadays, it’s video. To show you a comparison, a photo on my feed in 2023 will get around 150-300 eyes on them with more than 3000 followers. A video will get anywhere from 300-6.000 views. So naturally, creators like me that use their social media for marketing will make more videos.
Videos take a lot more time to make though. A. Lot. Which is why I started my little experiment. I had a new series of paintings to show all of you and I wanted to give Instagram one last chance to be fun, because I really do think it used to be fun!
I prepared a ton of ‘content’ with my paintings, videos where I was painting in the studio, reels with voiceovers, closeup photos of paintings, my sketchbook and even some unedited talking videos announcing print and patreon stuff. I had enough ‘content’ to post consistently for two months.
It took a few days to prepare everything (I’m not counting the time it took to make the photos and videos, just the edits, planning and writing captions) and I felt so empty after, but I thought you know, it’s a few days work for two months of rest. Worth it.
Those two months are almost up now, and remember I said I wanted to test if this could still be fun? Well, it wasn’t really. The empty feeling I had after those few days of work stayed on and because the posts weren’t seen that much, with the occasional exception, it just felt like a waste of time. Time I could’ve spent painting. And on top of that I still had to go on Instagram to promote my posts on my stories to get some eyes on my feed. So that made it take even more time!
My little experiment was to see if I still had fun over there, the answer is no. I don’t like short form ‘content’ and I keep saying ‘content’ because I’m an artist, not a content creator. However, reducing my work to just a sentence, or a fun happy reveal video does feel like ‘creating content’ and I’m not here for it.
I can’t just stop showing my work because I don’t like the rules though, so I want to make new ones. I love writing newsletters like this, I love creating longer YouTube videos showing my whole practice, I like showing my sketchbook in the context of a longer story. Instagram just isn’t the platform for that.
A platform I do really like is Patreon, which is where you can find me from now on! I want to share with you all of the above, with a group of people that I know will love to read and see more of what I do instead of rolling the dice with a platform like instagram. Yes, it’s a paid platform, so it’s completely up to you to decide if you’re able to support my work. But if you decide you’ll become my patron, you’ll directly be involved in me being able to spend the time to share my work and even making the work in the first place. You’ll be directly supporting an artist which work you love (hopefully you do if you’re subscribed to this newsletter ;).
I won’t stop posting to instagam but I definitely won’t be preparing two months ahead anymore. I’ll probably see it more as a sketchbook/bulletin board where I won’t put in as much time anymore. I have to remind myself sometimes that the platform has to work for me and I don’t work for the platform. Nowadays it feels the wrong way around.
Anyway, this became a very long text. Now I’ll tell you a bit more about how much fun it’s going to be on the other side!
I’m starting out with two tiers you can subscribe to: the Atelier and Atelier deluxe. The first one includes longer written posts with sketchbook and painting updates, inspiration I find in other artists and exhibitions and exclusive art sales! I used to host them on my instagram, they were always very successful but I feel like I want to make it a less public thing.
The second tier will include someting people have been asking me about for a very long time: online tutorials. Every month you’ll get to see a new tutorial about a topic you want. There’s a few waiting for you already and I also included the Basics tutorial list in the first tier as a gift. You’ll also receive a physical thank you print of mine with a handwritten note in the post, as well as every year around the holiday season.
Releasing this has been one on my list for a long time and I’m super excited to see what it grows into. My inner self-sabotaging voice is still screaming but I’m about to shut her up and just click send :-) Thank you for taking the time to read all this and I hope to see you there!
- Roxy
