Defining the Goals of my Digital Painting Blog - Changes will be happening!

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My ideal audience: write a wanted ad for your ideal audience: These are the thoughts I had …

• I am writing my blog to teach digital painting techniques, specifically digital watercolour techniques.
• I post my art to my online gallery to sell it and show people what I paint (using the techniques I'm blogging about!) 
• The problem is the target audience for these two activities is totally different. 
• People looking to buy art don't need to be taught how to paint it. They do like to know how it was created and the story behind it.  
• People needing to be taught art don't want to buy art. They might buy some service that teaches them art. 
• My goal is to figure out how to reach both these audiences and make them do what I want them to do, by giving each of them what they want. 
• The next logical step here has to be to get the art learner's to buy a service I can offer and the art buyer's to learn something about my art.

So, what do I have that people might want? Art, lots of art that I believe is being offered at a good and fair price. Problem with this is, so do a millions of other artists. I can't find a statistic estimating how many artists are trying to sell, and are successfully selling art online. Judging from the number of artists on sites such as Imagekind, Red Bubble, Fine Art America, and the plethora of art websites in general, I would have to say that there has never before in history been so much art available to buy.

It might be prudent to think of something else to have that people might want. The competition for selling art is fierce.

I am constantly in search of digital watercolour painters who paint from scratch on a blank canvas, and the truth is, that I really haven't found very many…especially not very many painting landscapes, flowers, and still life. If you do, or if you know someone who does, please send me a link. I believe, therefore, that I have something fairly unique to offer.

Can I legitimately conclude that after six years of painting digitally that I could teach people a thing or two about it? Maybe the reason I am not finding many artists painting digital watercolours with the digital and watercolour variants in Corel Painter 11 is that there are not many people who want to! I do not reach this conclusion, however, because I have heard over and over through the years that the watercolours are very difficult to master. Many digital artists steer clear of them altogether.

Do you fall into this category? Do you settle for less, when you know you would really love to paint with digital watercolours? Do you have a secret yearning to express yourself in a creative and artistic way? Perhaps you are like me and have wanted to paint watercolours (or other mediums) all your life but, never had the opportunity. The thought of wasting good paper and paint while learning how to paint was more than my frugal soul could handle.

Having the full studio of art supplies available in Corel Painter 9 and my trusty Wacom tablet and Intuos Pen I launched myself into the journey of learning to paint digitally. I am now using Painter 11 and on my second Wacom tablet (I wore holes in the first one because I painted so much!) I am on my third printer (an Epson Stylus Photo R1800), and have been through tons of paper and inks trying to get a printout of my digital watercolours that meets my vision of how it should look.

I had to learn how to paint and draw too. It was all totally new to me when I started. The very first brush I tried was a watercolour variant, Soft Runny Wash. It dripped alarmingly down the page at a fairly slow rate. The ways to control it seemed very esoteric and unknown, the possible variations infinite... In other words, it scared me silly and I didn't fiddle around with them much again for a long time.  

I gradually overcame this fear and refused to let the fact that this was hard work stop me. I began to focus on achieving an authentic watercolour look. The digital watercolour medium is hugely different in physicality to the traditional watercolour medium. I am not hindered by this because I haven't painted enough watercolours in a traditional manner to miss the fluidity completely.  My approach has been to look at the challenge from the point of view of making a mark on the paper that looks like it was painted with wet paint and a brush. Rather than trying to replicate the physical action of a certain type of paint loaded brush and stroke. Having control over the marks I am making matters more to me than making a brush that makes the exact mark I want. So often the 'visual language' of watercolour (to borrow John Derry's phrase), is about a series of marks made and then often altered on the paper after they were initially made.  

Knowing and understanding several ways to accomplish something ie: making a graduated wash, blending wet into wet colours, reducing the amount of colour in a selected area and so on are the skills I have learned and can easily teach to others. What you paint with those skills will be as different from what I paint, as it would be with you learning to paint traditionally. Many of my tips and techniques use other brush categories and functions available in the Painter studio.

In conclusion I left this comment on David Risley's guest post on ProBlogger.

"The exercise "Write an ad for your ideal audience," made me realize that I had two different audiences for my online gallery/art blog website. I always knew that I did, but believed attracting visitors to my website would ultimately help me sell more art. What started out as a journal of my journey as a beginning artist, has grown into a blog focusing mainly on teaching my painting tips and techniques. People looking for information on how to paint with the digital watercolour and watercolour variants in Corel Painter are my primary visitors. Many of my visitors have visited lots of times, so there must be something of value there for them. I am passionate about discovering ways to paint digital watercolours with visually authentic language and sharing them with others who love the challenge and appearance of watercolour. Defining my ideal audience made me realize that purpose of my blog had changed and I'd better get with it and make the leap from giving free advice and help to asking people to pay for it. I will likely always maintain the journal aspect of blogging about what I am learning as an artist and a blogger, but now I feel more confident that I do have something of value to sell…besides my art! J "

Joan A Hamilton

Posted in Teaching Digital Painting. Updated January 6th, 2012. 3 comments so far. Share on StumbleUpon, Delicious or Digg.

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