Tag: growth

Art, Self-Development & Life Lessons from Painting | Liron’s Podcast Episode 73

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In today’s episode I want to present you with a new topic I want to introduce into my content and products, and that is… Self-development!

Art & Self-Development

For the longest time self-development, growth and actualization have been a part of my life.

It’s one of my core values to push myself to improve, both as an artist and as a person.

And now, I believe it’s time to introduce more of that into my videos, posts, podcast episodes and courses.

How I Got the Idea

My good friend Alex – A conversation with him made me realize how important this is for me.

I basically complained to him about something, and his reply was something like this: “Why do you insist on becoming a watercolor teacher? What interests you even more is self-development in art.

Hearing that hit me hard, because it’s so darn obvious!!

I ALREADY make this kind of content – Alex also pointed that out for me. Doh! I’m already making so much content revolving around the process, how to become better, habits to help you improve, creating with courage and passion etc.

So I already do this. Now I want to pour more of that into the content I create, as well as the products / courses I sell.

YouTube & Instagram comments – this is another thing that helped me realize this. I started paying attention to what comments I really vibe with.

I noticed something interesting. While I love comments about me helping someone improve their watercolor skills, what I REALLY enjoy is people talking about how I helped motivate them, give them courage to try, or encourage them to try harder.

That’s what REALLY makes me feel good. And producing content that will help people more and more with THAT, is something I’m very curious about trying more of.

Life Lessons Learned from Watercolor Painting

I recently posted a vid on this topic on YouTube, as a first dip into this new territory. For this podcast episode I cut out the audio and added it here.

If you want to watch the actual video, you can do that too.

In the video I cover the four major insights I gained in the last couple of years, from painting. Those are (1) Letting Go (2) Trusting the Process (3) Patience (4) Speed & Spontaneity.

I hope you enjoy this very first attempt, as well as future ones to come.

And I also hope to create some courses around my experience in this area too.

And with that being said, time for today’s Artist Corner!

Artist Corner

Today we’re looking at Harold B Herbert. He was an Australian painter who lived from 1892-1945.

His life story is fascinating, and his watercolor skills are VERY impressive.

I highly recommend you check out his:

Work – Harold B Herbert Paintings & Sketches
Quick Bios – 1 – Quicker / 2 – More Details

I will also review him in the upcoming episode of Painting Masters (31), that’ll be out on Thursday, May 9th, 17:00 EST.

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

Going All-in on Instagram & What I Learned (for Artists)| Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 49

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Today I wanted to share this update regarding the recent changes I made in my Instagram routine / strategy / tactics, and the impact they had on my presence on the platform.

Two Main Changes on Instagram

I changed two main things in my Instagram routine:

1. Increased post frequency

This did prove to provide faster growth, and it didn’t seem my audience “got tired” of my content (:

I basically moved from 1 post a day to 2-3.

2. Tons of stories

I used to post 1-3 stories a day, and sometimes zero. Now I’m doing as much as 15-30 stories. I’m also making sure I use hashtags there as well.

One last thing I did, though that was a little while before all of that, was changing to a business account. I wanted to get the analytics (:

The Results & Impact on my Instagram Account

I’ve been feeling the acceleration in growth in terms of followers, no doubt.

But the more important thing is the amount of messages and genuine comments I’ve been getting, which really blew me away.

The engagement went crazy too.

So we’re not talking only about quantity, but also about quality.

Future Plans

My future plans are basic – keep this new baseline, and increase / go above it as much as possible. I’ve been doing the occasional 4 or 5 posts a day too.

I will keep you updated on how it goes! (;

That’s all I wanted to share today. We can now move onto the artist corner.

Artist Corner

Today I’m featuring Ilya Ibryaev, a Russian watercolor painter.

His focus seems to be light, and I don’t mean that in the usual sense. His great talent is portraying actual light shining through trees and clouds. He focuses on simpler landscapes with more complex and interesting skies, clouds and light.

What I noticed he does is play around with edges and contrast, to create a strong illusion of light. It actually FEELS like you can see the light itself.

If you want to see what I mean, I actually found a GREAT article written on him over at Seamless Expression – a website about painting and watercolor that I LOVE: Ilya Ibryaev on Seamless Expression

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