Tag: success

Can Anyone Become a Successful Artist | Liron’s Podcast Episode 95

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Hi there! In this episode I’m discuss the question – can anyone become a successful artist?

My general answer is YES, with a few caveats.

Here’s what we’ll talk about:

  1. Definition
  2. Internal Challenges
  3. Talent and Skill
  4. Financial Success

1. Definition

A big thing to think about, is how do you define success?

I believe success is ultimately happiness. This means that if you have a job you love, and you make art on the side and are happy – you won!

So YES – anyone can become a successful artist if you look at it from this angle.

2. Internal Challenges

Many people I meet and talk to have INTERNAL obstacles only. They don’t believe in themselves, and this prevents them from creating.

Art is ultimately self-expression. I’d like more people to understand that if they WANT to create – they should. The rest doesn’t matter.

3. Talent and Skill

Even talent and skill are in question. You see plenty of artwork that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of skill behind it, that is still successful, and celebrated in museums and galleries.

The word “skill” is arguable in and of itself. Who says, for example, that an abstract painting that took only a few brush strokes to make does’t require skill?

And if so many people say – “I could have done it” – well – why didn’t you?

Food for thought, especially if you feel judgmental of these types of works (which I know can be fun sometimes, haha!).

4. Financial Success

This is a little trickier. I do think different people have different potentials for money-making.

BUT, could almost anyone create SOME financial success around their art? I believe so. You just have to figure out your true gift, and the format.

Are you a good teacher? Manager? Story-teller?

Perhaps you are SO OFF THE CHARTS when it comes to art, that you should focus ONLY on that, and hire people to do the rest (which for most people would mean have friends help out, as not a lot of people can actually really hire someone when just getting started).

In Conclusion…

Yes, that is my answer. If you are having doubts, or are unsure – use this podcast as permission to AT LEAST believe it’s POSSIBLE.

And let me know if you have any questions or there’s anything I can help you with.

Here’s how to contact me:

YouTube – Liron Yanconsky Art

LinkedIn – Liron Yanconsky

Pinterest – Liron Yanconsky

Instagram – @LironYanIL

Twitter – @LironYan

You Only Need One Yes to Succeed – Artist Career Advice | Liron’s Podcast Episode 88

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In this episode we talk about how to get things going and be more proactive, and how you only need ONE yes to succeed.

* I mistakingly say it’s episode 87, ignore (:

Grabbing Success Proactively

One common theme in this episode is GRABBING opportunities as opposed to waiting for things to happen, or to “be discovered”.

I believe that if you want to achieve something, you have to sometimes go for it and reach out. You have to ASK.

How I Sold My Book’s Foreign Language Rights

This is a story I went through several times.

In this instance, I decided I want to publish one of my books in a language different than English.

This is called selling a book’s foreign rights.

The advantage for the book author is that they don’t have to do anything. The publisher who purchases the rights does the translation, design and distribution.

And the author basically gets a percentage, like most book deals.

So how did I do it?

I REACHED OUT to over 200 different publishers, in several languages (mostly Spanish).

I got 196 NOs, 3 maybes and, at last… 1 yes.

And it was by a pretty serious publisher.

And that’s ALL I needed.

You Are the Driver of Your Career

If you want to go to places, you HAVE TO do things proactively. You are the one who wants to GET, so you have to ASK, and make the deal worthwhile. Always.

My book in question was a consistent bestseller on Amazon for the past 5 years, and so I actually offered real value to the publisher.

And someone eventually said yes.

Galleries & Magazines

I had two more recent similar experiences.

Galleries – I recently put some of my paintings in a gallery for the first time. This came after the same thing – a lot of reaching out.

Art Magazine article – I’m having an article published in a magazine in October (shhh, it’s a surprise so don’t tell anyone (; ). Same thing – reaching out.

I hope this episode encourages you to chase what you want and try getting it – for real.

Remember you always have to offer real value to the other side you’re asking from.

And this is it for today!

Reach Out to Me

YouTube – Liron Yanconsky Art

LinkedIn – Liron Yanconsky

Pinterest – Liron Yanconsky

Instagram – @LironYanIL

Twitter – @LironYan

Ask And Your Shall Receive – How to Get What You Want as Artists | Liron’s Podcast Episode 78

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In today’s episode I wanted to talk about the ask – asking is the way to get what you want.

I’m providing an example of me.

I Branded Myself as a Teacher

I’ve branded myself as a teacher for so long, that people almost never ask about purchasing paintings.

Once I figured out this was the deal, I started “asking” for what I want.

I started mentioning when a painting’s for sale. I started saying what I want to happen.

And it worked! I’m already starting to get more of what I want.

The Market Will Tell You

Once you ask, the market will answer.

When what you want to have happen – happens – it means you are on the right track!

When what you want doesn’t happen, there may be something you need to work on.

In the example of selling art – maybe you need to improve your artwork, or perhaps your pricing isn’t optimized.

And that’s it for today’s ep! And now – artist corner.

Artist Corner – Tytus Brzozowski

Today I featured Tytus Brzozowski, an incredible Polish watercolor painter and architect.

His watercolor art is among the most unique and impressive I’ve seen. He works in a surrealistic style, and combines realistic stories with fantasy worlds.

His knowledge in architecture really serves his paintings, and adds an air of professionalism when it comes to his buildings and their details.

You can check out his work on his website: Tytus Brzozowski 

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

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