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On Friday 28th August I was a little bored. I had finished the Trevi Fountain piece after 50 hours of work, decided to have a few days off and spent the time creating some more reels to spread the word.
I’d had an idea floating around for a while and made a 5 second reel called “The Poke – Is Anyone Out There?”. For me it was a reaction to the nagging doubt that people weren’t interested in my reels and were just scrolling past - but still counted as a ‘view’. If you haven’t seen it yet (why not?) there is a link below.
https://www.tiktok.com/@kevhardyart/video/7679107611907656982?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
Now most of my reels about illustrations get around 1k views or so, some do much better, but that is a fair average after 3 months of plugging away.
The Poke got 1,500 within 12 hours, and 6,500 after 3 days! It continues to be my most popular reel of all time with more than 15,000 views as of today, closely followed by the second in the series with over 13,000.
I have no interest in simply becoming a ‘content creator’ to get views, but this raised an interesting opportunity. The people who have enjoyed these comedy reels have also viewed the reels about my artwork and started following me (107 as of today) and, most importantly, visiting my website. So, I am now planning to do more of the funny stuff to see if it attracts even more people.
Blog
There have been a few new blog posts this month.
Stories in Stone – The Trevi Fountain, Rome which delves into the history behind the illustration.
When did social media become anti-social? which explores my long and changing relationship with the digital world over the last 26 years.
The Accidental Content Creator which explains the recent phenomenon of The Poke series of reels.
Another piece will be published on 2nd October: Am I Good Enough? which is about imposter syndrome and how it has been an ever-present cloud in my life.
New Work
After spending 50 hours working on the Trevi Fountain I decided to take a break and didn’t do any illustrating for 2 weeks – I was still keeping busy exploring reel creation and getting to grips with a great (free) bit of software called DaVinci Resolve. It has been a steep learning curve but will hopefully pay dividends quality wise.
After some thought I decided to do another lighthouse – Portland Bill as it was the other suggestion Martyn from Reading had. In comparison this took a mere 9 hours to complete and is available from the website now.
Competition
A new competition started at the beginning of the month – The Finer Details which asks you to guess the illustration from a small detail. This has proved quite successful in getting a lot of views but there haven’t been any correct answers as yet. If no one guesses correctly by the end of the month the competition will carry over to next month but with a slightly larger area of the illustration on view. If there are no correct guesses after 3 months the competition will end and the answer revealed.
Reels
Hopefully you will have noticed an improvement in the quality of the reels I am producing. There are two new series called Screen Wipe and Watery Melt which utilise my growing skills with animation techniques in Clip Studio and DaVinci Resolve. This definitely keeps me interested in pushing the limits further and hopefully stops followers from getting bored with the content. It also gives me something to do during the long days of retirement and keeps my brain active as the years creep ever onward!
One consequence of all this is that the reels take a little longer to make, leaving me less time to actually draw! So, making reels may be fun but I still need some drawings to make reels about. You may have already noticed that I am not posting as often as I had been having decided to stop posting reels every weekday, and it is now Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with a new Poke reel appearing each Saturday. If that is still to much workload (I am retired after all) I might then consider posting on just a Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday instead.
As ever, thanks for reading and for your continued support. Whether you've bought a print, shared a reel, entered a competition, or simply taken the time to read this, it genuinely means a great deal.
