Why Video? (Patreon)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our relationship with visual art has changed. In the ancient before-times, when there was no internet, access to visual art was constrained. You could buy magazines or art books or postcards with cool images on them. You could see cool things on TV or in movie theaters (but you couldn’t do that on-demand—you had to see what was playing at that moment, or if you were lucky, you could record it on a tape and play it back later). If you were into comic books, then that was a *great* source of visual art, quite affordable (if only in B&W; color was still pretty rare). It was a big deal to have B&W art in things like RPG sourcebooks. It’s hard to explain how exciting it was to pick up the original D&D manual and see neat things from fantasy novels drawn on paper. But if that wasn’t your speed, you could go to museums or galleries for High Culture exposure, or you could go to the mall’s print shops to find reproductions of famous art you could buy to hang in your living room.

So while I wouldn’t call the past an art desert, visual art was far less accessible, and more precious, and more costly, especially in color.

What you didn’t have back then was the firehose of constant art that the internet enabled. I can wake up, roll over in bed to pick up a tablet or phone, and instantly browse hours and hours of art from every historical period in history, and every piece of art being done by artists right now. You can search for and find art about anything you want and get so many examples, and in such high fidelity, that you can glut yourself on it daily for years and not be done.

Which brings me to the conundrum of making a living as an artist, in an age where access to amazing visual art in nearly infinite quantities is free.

I wasn’t old enough to be a professional anything in the era prior to the full-color web-enabled internet’s arrival, but it was hard enough then to make a living at visual art. The paths were pretty clear: you could go the fine artist route, and sell via galleries; or you could go the commercial route, and work in ads/packaging/marketing; or you could be one of the select few who succeeded in earning a seat at an animation studio, or as a magazine’s go-to illustrator. But at that point, access to art, and the ability to buy reproductions of it, was scarce, and scarcity leads you to money.

So what do you do when scarcity isn’t a thing, and art is so accessible it becomes an interchangeable commodity?

This is the question I’ve been struggling with for a while. Years, really, when I made the choice to focus so intensely on writing as my primary money-making vehicle. The old ways of monetizing fiction, while subject to the cultural changes brought about by the internet, are still viable, for the most part… and the cultural changes have added new methods, rather than completely exploding the existing ones. There’s room for experimentation without as much risk. But visual art has become a complete mess as a business proposition. How do you sell reproductions to people who can buy more art than they have room to hang? How do you convince people to pay you for your picture of a unicorn when they can see thousands of unicorn pictures for free? Save seven different pictures from that search as wallpaper for their multiple devices without even checking to see who drew the pictures? Even the meme gifts we use to make jokes and communicate on social media are taken for granted. The movie/tv ones are easy to identify, but the animated ones? The ones of random people? Who are those people? Who drew those animations? Who knows or cares?

I have always championed, and will continue to champion, the importance of original artwork. I think the physical experience of art is irreplaceable: when you hold it in your hands and know that the artist was touching that piece of paper, making mistakes and glory on it both, when you can smell the salt or alcohol in the paint, see the texture and touch it gently with a finger… those things matter, and will always matter to us as physical creatures. But there are only so many originals you can sell. So I have been thinking about how you monetize art when you don’t want to sell originals, and that was how I ended up back on Youtube.

I’m pretty resistant to video because it’s not a medium I consume much of, and honestly I don’t think of myself as a video-friendly talking head. But it’s a different proposition when I’m not pointing a camera at my face, and realizing that I didn’t have to, in order to engage people, was a big light bulb moment. Talking about art—about the materials used to create it, and the process that makes art, and the challenges and pleasures and technicalities of it—is monetizable, to people who want to become artists, or to people who are simply fascinated by how things work. If I can’t sell a piece of art made with a certain color of calligraphy ink, but I can monetize a video where I talk about that ink and why I like it, or draw something for an audience with that ink, then I am once again on my way to making a living off visual art. Or at least, adding another income stream that makes use of the materials I’ve already acquired to make the work that matters to me.

Video, then, becomes two things: a way to share an experience with viewers (and experiences are always monetizable); and a way to teach prospective learners (and teaching is monetizable). And that turns my art studio from a place where money goes to die (hello, expensive art supplies), and into a place where people can hang out and listen to/watch a process that interests them, for whatever reason.

This is why I’m setting up for video. Because visual art is nearly impossible to turn into a money-maker in a world of infinite supply. But you can use visual art as a material to create video, and while there’s a huge supply of video as well, video is a lot more interesting to human beings than static art. We’re just wired to like staring at moving things that make noise. You can complain about it, and you can resist it, or you can decide to seize on the opportunities it gives you, in whatever ways are possible. I’d prefer to adapt.

There are a lot more things going on in my head about this—and a lot of conflict, I won’t lie. But my primary motivator is to reach a different audience from my existing audience (otherwise what’s the point of another income stream? You’re not supposed to be hitting up the same people for money, over and over. That’s predatory, and pointless). That means my Youtube channel might not be for everyone, particularly if you’re around for my writing (though I plan some writing-related content too). But if you love my art, or art in general, then this will be up your alley… and will hopefully attract a lot of new people who don’t know me from Eve. A lot more people. Like, at least 960ish people, which is the number I’ll need before I’ll be eligible to be paid. XD

So, that’s my initial explanation. The question of how I go about it, technically, is something I’m still working on (and, as with my book sales, I have issues with limiting myself to a single distributor, but fixing that issue in video is a lot more challenging than it is in books).

Since I’m talking about this, here are some of the videos I’ve uploaded that I’m trying new things with, and a representative video:

• Ink Reviews: I have a billion inks, it feels like, and they all act differently. I love them, but monetizing the use of ink is particularly challenging for me because I only use them to write with, not to draw with. So I am trying a ‘here’s how this ink works’ set of reviews. These are supposed to be short: in and out. Here’s a good sample one, of Rose Gilt Tynte. https://youtu.be/Ae0t6qK28YM 
• Doodle Talks: Chats, under five minutes, about little tips I’ve come up with to combat various creative issues. This one is about how burnout can have different causes, and you have to be mindful of why you’re burnt out to solve the problem: https://youtu.be/nA01Ha1W7cg 
• Timelapses: I still have lots of leftover videos of my livestreams from 2020, and I’m turning those into timelapses. It’s fun to watch painting at 400%+ speed, but I find the marker sketch ones are particularly wild, so here’s one of those. These videos are longer, for people who have more time to spend. https://youtu.be/oyDM4DDlqM4 
• Art Tool Discussions: I have tried many tools in my day, and one of the few ways I’ve ever used video is to “see” what a tool might look like when I try it. Since I hate when people spend ages getting to the meat of the thing, I try to keep these short, like this review of oil papers. https://youtu.be/ULTh-i9lx8A 
• Livestreams of new art: And finally, trying to return to livestreaming regularly the way I was in 2020. I’m pleased about some parts of Youtube’s livestreaming, and find some of it not as great as Twitch’s. It is, however, much less rickety than Locals’s livestreaming, so I am sticking with it. Youtube preserves those, and even scrolls the realtime chat alongside in playback at the right time, so you can make sense of my offhand comments by checking the chat and seeing who asked me a question and what it was. These are the longest videos. https://youtu.be/naOm2wKJ8kA

I also have some writing videos planned, but some of those are very involved in terms of finding art to illustrate them, so they’re coming slower than the purely visual stuff. Which is fine, since the point of the channel is to make use of my art skills. However, if you want more of my writing stuff, I have a ‘For Peltedverse Fans’ playlist here, where I’m collecting all the various videos that have any relation to that setting: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH8klg1Z-Z2o0jJL85rAfLpwaQDPiEZQi

That, then, is what’s up with this push. It’s a way to (eventually) make money with art, and to give me some additional security in terms of income streams. If you’d like to help out with that, please subscribe! Or tell me what you’d like to see more of. I’m all ears, especially in this experimental setting-up stage.