Tag: YouTube

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

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

Does YouTube Hate Me? | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 52

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Hi there, Liron here!

I recently published a YouTube video, discussing the recent decline in views. I wanted to share it here as well, in audio form, in case you’ve missed it.

Preface to “Does YouTube Hate Me?”

I would like to also preface this podcast episode by saying I’m super grateful for anyone who watches my videos. My intent is NOT to take current viewership lightly.

I want to thank you for watching, reading, listening, commenting and all the great things you do. This means a lot to me, and is the main source of my happiness (as well as income (: ).

YouTube Views

In the last while I’ve been feeling a steady decline in the YouTube views, as well as some slow down in subscribers.

In the video / this podcast episode I wanted to share this with you, as well as get some feedback as to why this may happen.

My YouTube Success Is MY Responsibility

I wanted to stress that I’m fully aware my wins and losses are 100% my own responsibility.

I produce the content. If it works – it’s my success. If it loses – it’s MY failure.

Conclusion

I want to thank you for listening. Again – I’m trying to tackle this from a positive perspective of learning and improving.

Your feedback on the video has been very helpful. And if you have any additional feedback I would appreciate it a lot.

You can do so by commenting below, or contacting me in any of the places I reside in (list below too).

And with that being said – now it’s time for our Artist Corner!

Artist Corner

Today I’m featuring Victoria Prischedko!

Victoria is a watercolor painter, working in a very loose impressionistic style. Her drawing skills are excellent, and this carries in an interesting way in her loose work.

One thing that really characterizes her work is her use of warms and cools. She paints with lots of reds and blues, creating an interesting contrast and plays of temperature.

You can check out here work here:
https://www.facebook.com/prischedko/

And you can read more about her here:
https://www.aquarellereimsevenement.com/index.php/en/viktoria-prischedko-gallery-en

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

Interviewing Patrick Ley-Greaves | Liron Yanconsky’s Podcast – Episode 39

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Hi there, Liron here (:

Today I wanted to share with you my interview with Patrick Ley-Greaves. It was originally posted as a video on my YouTube channel (which you can check out here: Patrick Ley-Greaves video interview).

Now I wanted to also share it in audio form, as I know some of you prefer that.

Interviewing Patrick Ley-Greaves

The interview covered multiple topics related to painting, drawing, creativity and motivation.

I feel like Patrick and I share similar perspectives on many topics. What I love about him is that he truly believes anyone can create. His approach is very encouraging and uplifting, and seems to bring the best out of people.

Prior to these interviews, I do a preparatory video call. It usually takes about an hour or so.

Patrick and I ended up talking for about 3 hours.

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun talking to Patrick, and the whole experience was great. I hope you also enjoyed listening to the interview.

As a side note – we did the interview a while ago, but I’m only now posting it, after my month-long vacation.

I hope to be back on track soon, with the normal posting schedule for the podcast and YouTube channel.

Thank you for your continued support and for sticking around!

And Here’s where you can find me (:

You can support me on Patreon

Check out my YouTube Channel – Liron Yanconsky

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

And this is it. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I’ll talk to you again real soon!

– Liron