One year of Youtube videos & my art journey

After one year... What did I learn?

In this blogpost, I want to talk a little bit about my Youtube journey. I started this journey in February 2023, and it has now been a year! To celebrate this anniversary, I thought it would be nice to do a small recap of my art journey, and how I came into Youtube. I also want to give my experience on making Youtube videos, and what I want to do next with my channel :)

I have done a video where I talk a little bit about these two last subjects, you can find it here:

My art journey

The early days

First thing, I want to do a short recap of my art journey. I have never went to an art school, or had an art teacher. As a child, I enjoyed trying to reproduce drawings, but was never very good at it. I did it from time to time, during my holidays, but not on a regular basis. When I was in junior high school, I had one-hour of "art class" for four years. It is mandatory in every junior high-school in France, but the content varies a lot from one teacher to another. I was bottom of the class in arts, and did not enjoy the assignments at all. Each week, we had a new assignment, and we were suppose to "produce" something based on this assignmenets. However, the class was not structured into techniques, or learning the basis of drawing. After that, I gave up on art for a while. A few years, at university, I started again to draw for pleasure, always reproducing images. 

When the covid pandemic started, I realized that art was very much of an escape and therapeutic practice for me. I have been dancing my whole life, but with the pandemic, dance schools were closed. Drawing, and painting became my creative espace! And it has been now integrated to my weekly creative process: apart from my full-time job, I find time to dance, to draw, to paint!

 

A few dates

In April 2021, I dabbled in watercolors for the first time. I started with a very crappy watercolor set that was included in a watercolor journal, with setp-by-step tutorials to paint flowers. I used whatever paint brushes I could find at home, from my childhood, and whatever "thick" paper I could put my hands on.

In May 2021, I started to build my collection of supplies. I bought nicer paper (100 % cellulose at the time), Winsor & Newton Cotman watercolors and brushes, and a few books to help me understand the basic techniques of watercolors.

The following year, in March 2022, I expanded my pool of supplies. I bought alcohol-based markers and colored pencils. This was mainly inspired by video Youtube that I was watching atthe time. Some very creative artists used mixed media, and it gave me itches to try!

In summer 2022, I started watercolor journaling, donf plein-air watercolors. This allowed me to gain inspiration directly from nature, which is still a huge part of my creative process now. Even when I don't go outside for painting, I collect lots of reference images from my past hikes, and travels, and use them to trigger my creativity. I also engaged in sketchbook practice: instead of having arts on scrape papers everywhere, I had all of my sketches, studies and dabbles in the same place! 

In 2023, I got a little bit overboard: I started digital art, oil pastels, acrylic paintings, etc. I love dabbling into new mediums! I have also realized that I love painting landscapes more than anything else. I have taken lots of Skillshare classes to get better at drawing, and learning new painting techniques. I have also started my Youtube journey. And I have also started to learn on my photography skills, to be able to take even better reference images!

The creative process

As you can see from the paragraph above, I am going a little bit all over the place with my art. It is lots of fun, but I sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by all the art supplies, all the possible subjects, all the existing techniques! 

In short, I look a lot around me, try to immerse myself in nature as much as I can. From that, I collect references: small plaint-air sketches, photographs, and maybe soon short videos!

When I am in the studio (basically, in my living room ;)), I look at these references and do lots of sketches with different media or, I directly dive into whatever medium I'm itching to use at the moment. So the painting process itself will vary a lot from one week to another, but I am trying to use a variety of media, and to find time both for "studies", "easy enjoyable art" and "more challengeing final pieces." I am currently writing a blogpost series on 100-day challenge, which can give you more insights on an example of my cretaive process.

The Youtube journey

2023 - First learnings and challenges

I started my Youtube channel in February 2023 for several reasons: I wanted to share my art with other people, but more than that, I wanted to share the journey and its challenges. I wanted to focus more on the process than the finished piece, to maybe inspire other people to dabble and have fun with art. Finally, I also wanted to use Youtube as an opportunity to make more time in my schedule to make art! 

The first year was full of  learnings. I realized that making videos was not only about making art, but also to make videos. It may seem obvious, but I had no experience at all in making videos, so I had to learn a lot: how to shoot videos, how to edit videos, how to export videos on Youtube... It is still very much a learning process, but it was very interesting to gain new sills! 

Making weekly videos was also a very good opportunity to actually make art at least weekly. I also wanted to have a variety of subjects and media on my videos, so it forced my to grab some of the supplies I did not go for as often. 

On the challenging part... Even if the Youtube channel was "just for fun", I still found it very hard to keep the pressure low. I wanted to have a "beautiful" channel, with lots of coherence, etc. But in reality, I struggle to find the style I want to give to my channel. What type of videos do I want to do? With which angle should I shoot them? Should I only paint landscapes? Should I do more vlog-style videos? These questions also resonate with the pressure to have more views. Even if it was not your intention, you start to wonder about what the viewers would want to see... And also, the channel and its community is not built in one day, not even one month or one year. It takes a long time to have views, and it can be very frustrating to put time and effort on a video, just to get 7 views after a couple of weeks. 

All of these challenges and pressure added up to the point where I had to take a few months break from Youtube in Summer 2023. I was not sure anymore what I wanted to do with the channel, and I kept putting a lot of pressure on myself to find new ideas, shoot new videos, and publish every week without breaks. Art was not fun anymore, and I lost my creative inspiration for a while. I took a few moths to do art "out of the grid" and regenerate my creative juices before starting again publishing.

2024 - Where do I want to go from here?

After this first year on Youtube, I am very careful not to put too much pressure on myself again. If I want to take holidays, I take holidays out of Youtube. It is still something I am working on, but I try to put less pressure on myself to actually publish every week.

I aslo want to tackle bigger projects this year. Last year, I realize that I did not tackle the bigger art projects that I had plan, partly because I did not know how to integrate them into my "publishing schedule". This year, I will try more to use Youtube as a motivation for me to tackle these projects. This means more planning ahead, but hopefully more fun in the process!

On the learning side, I of course want to continue improving on the quality of my videos. I have bought a better camera, and some storage. I am now thinking more about how to shoot my videos, what I want to convey through the videos, etc. I even started to shoot some of my evening art sessions, to - maybe - publsih vlogs! I am taking editing classes on Skillshare, to learn tips on how to make better videography.

Finally, I have an ambition to slowly start building a side-art business. I don't know yet how, but I have different ideas: selling prints, making classes on Skillshare, etc. I am hoping to be able to share this journey on my Youtube channel too!

If you are still reading, thank you, and congratulations! This blogpost ended up being way bigger than I had expected (and took me longer to write than expected). It made me things about lots of subjects I could tackle in future blogposts: the creative process, taking inspiration from nature, dabbling in (way too many) media, learning to make/edit videos, building a Youtube channel, my photography/videography gear, studies & learnings as a self-taught artist, etc. Let me know in the comment if some of these subjects sound interesting to you :)