Podcast Archives - Page 11 of 24

Let Vision Lead Your Technique

In today’s episode I want to share with you a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and that is of vision.

Vision is how we see the world. Every artist (and person for that matter) probably has a different vision of what they see.

That is why different artists create in different ways and notice different things.

Vision Leading Technique

My premise here is that there’s a way to create very clearly. To make the gap between your vision and your result as small as possible.

That is – to allow your vision lead the painting process rather then technique.

When you let technique lead the way, you may approach every painting the same way.

But every painting is different, and every scene is different.

So if you allow VISION to lead instead, you may end up with a better result.

Unique & Highly Personalized Art Style

The coolest part is this – it will probably also be more unique. Because you effectively “cleaned” your representation of reality.

This applies, by the way, to abstract art too! The reality I’m referring to can be a real physical scene, or the vision you have in your head.

I hope you found this helpful. The next time you create, try forgetting about technique, or the “correct” way of doing something. Instead – try to represent what you see as clearly as you wish, regardless of process.

And let me know how it goes!

Artist Corner

Today I talked about Wendy Artin. I was recommended by a follower to check her work out. And I must say – it’s incredible!

She does lots of figurative work, and has some very unique processes and approach.

I actually covered her in my Painting Masters series. You can check that episode out here (:

And Here’s where you can find me

Check out my YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

Or ask me questions on Instagram – @LironYanIL or Snapchat – @LironYan3

I hope you enjoyed this one. Take care, and we’ll talk again really soon,

— Liron

Authenticity in Art – Cesar Santos Interview | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 67

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In today’s episode I wanted to share with you a snippet of my interview with Cesar Santos.

This was an amazing experience, and Cesar is such a great guy!

You can check out the entire thing here:

Authenticity in Art

In this snippet Cesar shares his insights regarding developing your style, artistic freedom, being true to yourself and learning from others.

If you set aside techniques, master studies and so on… over the long run I find one of the most fun parts of creating is slowly learning more about yourself.

With time, and doing the right work, you become more and more like yourself, and less of an imitation of others.

I always aspire to learn from others, but at the same time preserve my authenticity, which is why this topic is so close to me!

Artist Corner

Today’s artist is obviously Cesar Santos.

He is a highly renowned classically trained painter and creator. He works in many drawing mediums, and mainly in oils.

His work is exhibited in galleries in the US and around the world. His series of paintings called “Syncretism” has been one of his major works, and he is always striving to teach, learn and improve.

You can check out his EXCELLENT YouTube channel here: Cesar Santos on YouTube

And his beautiful works on Instagram here: Cesar on Instagram

And Here’s where you can find me

Check out my YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

Or ask me questions on Instagram – @LironYanIL or Snapchat – @LironYan3

I hope you enjoyed this one. Take care, and we’ll talk again really soon,

– Liron

Huge YouTube Research – Growing Channel in 2019 | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 66

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I’m doing a huge YouTube research endeavor to figure out how to create better content that reaches MORE people.

I’ll keep this short, as I want to create a more detailed post on LinkedIn & Medium.com on the topic.

But here are the main things I learned.

Excellent Video by Derral Eves

So I watched this video and gained some valuable insights in regard to my own videos, and in general.

The new Creator Studio Beta – YouTube’s new Creator studio is INSANELY helpful.

They developed some relatively new features that I really like. The way they present the CTR (% of people clicking your thumbnails) is really smart.

I also loved how you can watch the retention graph alongside your video. This means that if you are rambling in the vid, you’ll probably see a drop of viewers on the graph.

The importance of thumbnails and titles – I always knew how important these are. But now I understand that in an even deeper level. As Derral mentions, some of the creators he works with spend hours coming up with their titles and thumbnails.

These provide you the chance of being discovered. And YouTube rewards videos that have a high CTR (and a high retention rate, which brings me to my next point).

AVD (Average View Duration) and watch time are everything – Ultimately YouTube wants to make money. If you can create content that gets a lot of clicks, and gets people to binge watch – that’s the best.

This is why it’s highly recommended to create playlists (like my The Paint Show and Painting masters). These are series that people enjoy consuming one by one.

Huge YouTube Spreadsheet

This is a project I’ve been working on in the last couple of weeks.

I created a huge spreadsheet with 50 or so YouTube channels, and different criteria (like video length, views %, likes to dislikes ration and a bunch of other more unique elements).

I am filling the table up, with hopes of finding different correlations between things.

For example – do channels that have NO INTRO perform better when it comes to views %?

There are a lot of things I want to test out, and hopefully this will be a good tool to do just that.

IGTV VS YouTube

IGTV is Instagram’s platform for video. Unlike YouTube, IGTV is vertical, and everything is based around that.

So far IGTV has been really good to me. I went all in and started posting tons of videos there, and it’s paying off.

Some of my vids reached as many as 600K views, and these accelerated my growth on Instagram as well.

So this is another platform I’m hopeful of. But I’m also aware that YouTube isn’t going anywhere soon. Plus the views there are more high quality, in the sense of more people who want to actually learn how to draw and paint.

Artist Corner

Today I talked about Randall Sexton. Randall’s a California-based oil painter. I love is impressionism and style.

His color choices are rather unique, I haven’t seen many artists paint like that. As always, his street scenes are my favorites. He has one I love in particular, of a van / trailer with a smooth reflective texture that he portrayed beautifully.

You can check out his work on his website: https://www.rcsexton.com/

And Here’s where you can find me

Check out my YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

Or ask me questions on Instagram – @LironYanIL or Snapchat – @LironYan3

I hope you enjoyed this one. Take care, and we’ll talk again really soon,

– Liron

What my Daily Podcast Taught Me | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 65

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I learned so much from my daily podcast, and would like to share my insights with you!

I’m going to keep the written version of this episode rather short and to the point. Let me know in a comment below your thoughts, and if there’s anything you want me to expand upon.

1. My Daily Podcast – How it Started

I started my daily podcast when I first got the Anchor.fm app on my iPhone. It was originally meant to be a social network – only audio based.

I knew audio is important, as podcasts are very popular, and decided to jump aboard.

With time, the app pivoted multiple times, and it is now a streamlined podcast publishing platform.

2. What I Learned From my Daily Podcast

Here we go, this is the main part of the episode…

a. Higher frequency trains your brain to come up with more ideas.

This is something I experienced when I got started on YouTube as well. The more I increased the video frequency (moving from once a week to three videos a week, and at certain times even daily), the more ideas my brain started generating.

This is quite amazing. You may think to yourself – I don’t have any ideas for a weekly episode – how will I do 2 or 3 a week.

Well, turns out that deciding to do more will eventually lead to more ideas. You may suck at first – but it will improve really fast.

b. Better at coming up with topics on the fly.

Doing the daily podcast forced me to come up with ideas and topics on the fly. I can now probably generate ideas faster and more easily.

c. Finding interest in small things.

Instead of trying to find the perfect topic, one no one has covered before me… The daily podcast taught me to FIND the interest in things.

I could recognize the interest of a very initial idea, and create content very fast. In the past I may deem it uninteresting or irrelevant.

d. Idea generating tool.

This is probably the biggest one for me. The crazy amount of ideas I gain from the daily podcast ends up translating into topics for videos, articles, as well as weekly podcast episodes.

It’s a powerhouse of generating new ideas I can use for multiple social media outlets.

And that’s it! There are actually two more points you’ll have to listen to the episode to hear (;

Artist Corner

Today I talked about Ekaterina Sava, a very impressive watercolor painter.

Her staple is floral paintings. The way she handles washes and combines wet-in-wet with sharper edges is amazing.

I highly recommend you check out her FB profile, where she shares a lot of her work:
Ekaterina Sava on Facebook

And Here’s where you can find me

Check out my YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

Or ask me questions on Instagram – @LironYanIL or Snapchat – @LironYan3

I hope you enjoyed this one. Take care, and we’ll talk again really soon,

– Liron

Improve Your Art INSTANTLY With FOCUS | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 64

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Today I’m going to show how to IMMEDIATELY improve your artistic results, without improving your actual skills.

This is aimed at visual artists mainly, and is probably relevant to any type of medium (watercolor, oils, acrylics, pastels, pen and ink – you name it!)

Spontaneity VS Planning

In the past I talked a lot about spontaneity, fun, looseness and allowing your instincts guide you.

To balance this out, today we’ll consider a more deliberate, planned approach.

No one method is the holy grail of anything. Doing BOTH is where the magic happens.

Highly-Detailed Painting

The thing that made me think more about this process, is this painting…

This painting “forced” me to slow down, consider my steps and become more patient.

And it taught me a lot.

I completely outdid myself, and it’s not necessarily thanks to an improvement in my skills, but rather thanks to the process I went through.

So let’s talk about some of the things that will help you improve your results immediately.

Improve Your Art With PLANNING

The first thing I would say is responsible to the improved result is me properly planning the painting.

I did several preparatory sketches in pencil. Some of the entire scene and composition, and others focusing on specific areas and details.

Here are some of those…

The main goal with these sketches is to familiarize myself with the scene, both on a macro level (overall composition), and on a micro level (details).

Focus & Slowing Down

That’s another thing I learned.

You want to deliberately slow down and work patiently. This also involved taking breaks whenever I feel like I’m getting impatient.

As soon as I felt like I was “trying to get to the end result”, rather than enjoy the process and be fully immersed in it – I took a break.

This proved to be very useful, and I kept my energy, motivation and creativity levels high throughout the whole thing.

And by the way, here are some stages from the start of the process until the end of it.

Deliberate Decisions

When painting it’s easy to get into auto-pilot mode.

Doing things on auto-pilot is useful. It’s essentially delegation of some actions to a lower-level element, to save resources.

Muscle memory can play a part in that.

But for some parts of the painting process, you want to be more present and deliberate.

So ask yourself – did I do this brush stroke out of habit and without thought, hoping for the best?

Or am I present to the moment, and doing things in a calculated manner?

If you are always hoping for the best, you may not achieve the result you want.

Last Tip – Scaling

When attempting to create an artwork that’s much LARGER than you are used to, I recommend scaling slowly and gradually.

Larger artworks, especially representational / realistic ones, will require more details as they scale up.

Sometimes it’s hard making the jump from a tiny thumbnail painting to a full sized one (the other way around is also true!).

So do it gradually.

Create a small thumbnail. Then double the size and make a slightly larger painting. Then double it again and do an A4 size. The again, until you are at the scale you are interested in.

This may seem a little redundant, but if you are planning a piece that will take a long time to finish, and you have that time, and you want it to be perfect (let’s say it’s a complex commission work) – this is a very useful process to follow.

And with that – we are ready to look at today’s artist!

Artist Corner

Today I talked about Yuko Nagayama, a Japanese artist.

Here work is so visually pleasing. She uses different subjects to symbolize different ideas and concepts.

She has a lot of florals, and what I especially love about them is that she is using so many colors as well, which reminds me of the way I tend to do portraits.

You can check out a lot of here work here, or by searching google images (;

And Here’s where you can find me

Check out my YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

Or ask me questions on Instagram – @LironYanIL or Snapchat – @LironYan3

I hope you enjoyed this one. Take care, and we’ll talk again really soon,

– Liron