Growing my Artist YouTube channel – 4 months in..
So, first off, I already had a YouTube channel, which was left redundant, and growing cobwebs. At the start of 2024 in January, I decided to try to actively grow my channel, why? To give myself and my business a chance to be seen by more and to hopefully drive more traffic to my website, and hopefully make more sales.
Now I visit You Tube daily, mostly to listen to music while I paint, or listen to podcasts, so I am aware of its format. I am very active on Instagram and Facebook and posted daily to both sites., so I am not a technophobe.
The thing with YouTube is that it is a very visual platform, but not still images (obviously) but video, so I had to decide what I would post, and I wanted the content to be of a good quality.
I have watched many tutorial videos on ‘how to paint’ and I have learnt a lot, but I wanted my videos to be more personal, for the viewer to understand why I paint what I paint, what inspired me. I decide on a vlog style, showing myself, talking about what I’m doing and why.
This all sounded incredible and I couldn’t wait to get started, I had a decent camera to film myself, I bought an arm to suspend the camera above my work to film the actual work, and I had a tripod (and my husband) to film me. The thing was I had nothing to edit with, up until now when editing any video, I had used Adobe Premiere rush, which comes with the adobe creative suite. It was very clunky and froze constantly, I needed another way to edit my work. So, I obviously asked You Tube, and found DaVinci Resolve 18.6 which is free and absolutely brilliant. The thing was I had no clue how to work it, so I began to learn. If you are going to go down the You Tube rabbit hole, I highly recommend this software, and if a 55-year-old woman can learn it, so can you!
My first video that I put out in January, was of a walk in the woods. I tried to create atmosphere and a feeling of place; I really enjoyed it from start to finish. The editing of the video took longer than the actual painting, as I was still getting used to the software, but it was fun to learn something new.
This video, as of today has 208 views which I am pretty happy with.
I then had the idea of touring the Yorkshire coastline, and painting what I saw in gouache, this is a far faster medium to work with, no drying time needed, but it was fairly new to me. I have visited 3 towns so far, and each video gets more likes and more followers.
In January I had 21 followers I now have 121 so 100 followers in 4 months, now I know its not 1000’s but it is a far faster growth than on Facebook or Instagram, these accounts have taken years to grow.
It feels that You Tube is a larger audience, it has a more global feeling too it. 4 months in, I am happy with the progress I am making, more visits to my website, more enquiries and a feeling of acceptance as an artist.