Tag: creativity

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

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

How to Develop a Personal Art Style – Basics & Experimentation | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 63

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Hi there, Liron here! In today’s episode I’m teaching you how you can develop your own personal art style.

Many artists strive to grow and develop their own style, but there are many myths about what it takes, and the truth is much simpler than some may think!

We’ll take a bit of a philosophical approach, but embed a lot of practicality to it!

Personal Art Style

Probably every artist you admire has their own unique art styles. Artists who work hard and attain higher and higher levels of creation, tend to also have a uniqueness to their work.

There is something very charming around a distinct art style. This leads many beginner and aspiring artists to worry about developing their own style.

Which brings me to my next point…

Unique Art Style – Don’t Assume you Don’t Have One

This is extremely important.

I want you to understand that with enough practice, repetition and experimentation, everyone develops a unique art style.

It’s inevitable.

So instead of worrying about that, let’s focus on what we can do to ensure you develop successfully as an artist (:

Fundamentals & Experimentation

The way I see it, there are two elements to improving continuously.

Working on the fundamentals / basics – This involved doing the exercises and learning the techniques that are relevant to multiple art mediums.

An example for this would be composition, color harmony, matching values (in case you are doing realistic / representational / naturalistic art) and so on.

Experimentation – This involves breaking our own patterns, using work processes that are foreign to us, trying to work in a different style, using colors we aren’t used to and so on. 

Using these two together ensures your skills will grow, and your style will develop.

Remember that every experiment you do, every technique you play around with – these all add up and become a part of your style. By experimenting frequently, you widen your style’s possible spectrum of expression.

And with repeated work on the basics, you’ll ensure that your technical skills won’t deteriorate while you experiment.

This works very nicely with my concept of Inspiration & Isolation which you can read about here.

Everyone ELSE Will Recognize Your Style

I want to mention something I find amusing. Ironically, you will be the last person to recognize the uniqueness of your style.

That’s just how it goes for most people (unless it’s really unique and out there).

People started telling me about a year ago, that they could tell my paintings apart from others very easily.

I was very surprised to hear, but wasn’t able to see that myself.

Now I can better understand what they mean. There are many nuances. It’s in how you treat the edges, how your brush marks look. There are a lot of signature properties it’s hard to put in words, but easy to tell when they’re there.

Conclusion

I hope this all makes sense. Let me know if you have any questions and I’d be happy to expand on whatever you want me to (:

And with that being said, let’s move on  to the Artist Corner.

Artist Corner

In today’s episode I talk about Oliver Pyle, an English watercolor painter.

Oliver specializes in natural landscapes and rural scapes. His works convey serenity and calmness that I find very relaxing.

His work also taught me a lot about conveying your message with simplicity.

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

Real-Time Narrated Painting Tutorials – YouTube Experiment Results | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 60

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Hi there, Liron again here! Today I want to share with you my recent YouTube experiment – posting only real-time narrated painting tutorials – and talk about the results.

Let’s get going!

YouTube Experiment

Over the last few months, many viewers mentioned how what they are missing are full painting tutorials. Meaning – they didn’t want time-lapse vids. They wanted to hear my thoughts as I painted.

Following these requests, I decided to give this a try for six videos, which are two weeks.

This means that for the past two weeks, I’ve been only posting longer (40+ minutes) tutorials.

Feedback I Got

The vast majority of feedback was very positive. People were commenting how hearing my thought process is really useful, and how real-time allows them to follow along the action.

On the other hand, there were probably one or two comments saying how the videos are too long, and how they preferred shorter vids.

Results on YouTube

This is more about my YouTube analytics. I noticed several interesting things here.

First, one of the videos has done really well, gaining over 10K views. This is a lot for me, as I average at around 2K views, I would say.

Aside from that one, two other videos show some promise, and will perhaps gain more views with time.

I did see an immediate increase in watch time, which makes sense – as I was posting much longer videos.

But with that, there were also more views in general. This could be attributed to the 10K views video, but I’m not sure about that.

Also, I did notice an increase in subscribers growth, which was very slow for a while now. I averaged for a while around 40-50 new subs a day, and then increase temporarily moved the average to around 70, with the peak at 100+.

These are great results.

YouTube Channel Future Direction

My main insight from this experience was that I MYSELF am interested in variety. After such a long time period of posting only these longer videos, I started craving making shorter videos.

Another insight was that you can’t please everyone, which is 100% okay. So I might as well do what interests me.

My plan is to now incorporate what I learned over the last two weeks into my routine. We’ll go back to the normal series (The Paint Show, Painting Masters), but I’ll also try and do at least 1-2 full processes every two weeks.

Conclusion

I hope this experiment pushed the needle a little more in the direction of me improving as an artist and a teacher. And I’ll keep you updated on future experiments and new ideas I get.

And now, it’s time for today’s Artist Corner!

Artist Corner

In this episode I talked about Jasmine Huang, an incredible Taiwanese watercolor painter.

Her paintings have a beautiful realistic vibe to them. She uses a very unique color palette and is very well-versed in wet-in-wet.

Coincidentally, she is also the wife of Chien Chung Wei, who I featured in a recent episode of Painting Masters. I believe I will dedicate an episode to her as well (:

The best place to check out here work would be Facebook:
Jasmine Huang on Facebook

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