I've been struggling the past couple days to get a demonstration video done for painting from photo reference, and I have 2 hours of footage shot, but it's too damn long. I'm just not able to paint fast enough, I waste too much time making mistakes. I know that this series is no longer being held to a 10-minute format, but I sure as hell don't want to drag it out to over an hour!
I've already taken 2 stabs at recording this (both went over an hour) but the results have been getting much better each time. Anyways, here are my most recent failures.
One of the things that always bugged me about a lot of painting demos is how they're often sped up and they don't talk about the problems they run into while they paint, and even before they paint. Maybe they don't run into these problems because they're super amazing artists. Well, I'm not a super amazing artist, I'm a normal bloke, so here's a painting demo for normal blokes.
By the way... I'm gonna try and get a video out at least once every two days, mostly because there just aren't any projects out there that seem like they'll be particularly successful. Simply breaking even to pay the rent on a job that won't test my skills as an artist is really just delaying the inevitable, wasting my time and draining my spirit, so I'd much rather spend my time doing what I enjoy (teaching through video tutorials) and doing something that I hope will help me succeed, and I hope helps others succeed.
But, as you can probably see from the donations (on that meter on the right), I might have a tough time doing this as long as I wish. On average, 300 of my videos are watched every day, which in YouTube terms, means I'm getting my ass kicked by the baby kitten videos and the videos where people do bad things to themselves for attention. I really need more exposure and I don't want to go about spamming websites because people get turned off instead.
I feel like I'm only appealing to a tiny portion of my potential audience, but doing stuff like elaborate intros and animated diagrams takes a really long time to produce, not like just jumping in and recording the order of the day. So if anyone's reading this, I'm eager to hear your thoughts on the series and where you'd like to see it go from here.
Recently, I had to monkey my wiring so that I could use an S-Video switchbox to swap between showing my ugly face, and showing my ugly drawings. It took a couple of visits to Active Surplus and I borrowed a Canopus ADVC-100 from Dad! I also have a rats nest of wire to deal with audio because I got fed up with the hissing and buzzing and inconsistent volume levels. Now I just have to stop blowing into the mic!!!