So this video is not about RossDraws specifically, it's about what I believe
he's doing better than almost any other independent artist out there.
This thing
that I'm going to tell you in a few moments
and we're going to talk about
in this video, I have to warn you, because of the very nature of this thing
is that when you hear about it
and when you try to get it, it reduces your chances of having it.
So honestly, if you if you're worried, you should really just stop
watching the video as soon as you hear me tell you what it is.
And if you really, really still want to watch the video, please, please
watch till the end, where I give you some tips on how to avoid
sabotaging yourself on this journey because it's a really delicate thing.
But boy, is it super important if you ever want to be successful
as an independent artist?
Now, I have made some videos about this kind of genre in the past,
especially last year, about, you know, just the finances and reality
of being an artist.
So I thought I would come to you today
and give you some more ideas and tips that I've learned to this year.
And I thought, why not do it in the same format?
Just super candid and talk to you straight at the camera.
So the thing that we're talking about is called brand.
It's having your own personal or art focused brand that is unique to you.
I've done a lot of research into this idea of brand,
and it's basically how the people who are looking at you and your artwork,
how they feel when they engage with your work.
And it's also basically the aura, the general
theme and everything, the vibe that you give off as a person
and or your artwork in your creations, what they give off to others.
So to take a step back here on how I started this journey,
I need to tell you about a little bit about how my year went.
So it was really good to keep it simple.
It was really good starting out
and then things started to go really, really badly, especially on YouTube.
So I decided I needed to step back.
I'm going to start a Patreon
and I'm going to set some high goals, and I'm going to not worry about YouTube
ad revenue anymore.
And I'm going to be completely honest with you guys.
My goal when I set out to make my patron was
I wanted to be making 2 to $4,000 a month for my patron alone.
I knew it was possible.
I'd seen other creators do it.
I look at charts and history is of how long it took them to do it.
And so I started doing all my research
and I was like, All right, this is going to be it.
I'm not going to have to worry about YouTube anymore.
So other creators that were really successful, other artists
that were really successful on Patreon, they were doing two things that help them
do really well.
So the first thing was that they were providing really, really good rewards.
It wasn't just like, Oh, here's my wallpaper.
No, they were usually providing some sort of educational or video content
so that their
patrons could really, really immerse themselves
and feel like they were getting a lot of value out of their products.
And I I've been a patron of several of these artists that I mentioned,
and I've seen their content and I was like, You know what?
I can deliver this.
I've got all this camera equipment, I've got all the microphones.
I can do this. I have experience. I've been doing YouTube.
This is something I can do.
The second thing I noticed was that every artist
was making around the same level of income that I wanted to make with.
My Patreon had a sizable audience.
It was pretty big,
nothing less than about 500,000 followers across all of their platforms.
So I'm just on a list if you I have them
actually listed on my whiteboard because I've been going through them.
So we're looking at the reaction of Schembechler and Lily Dusk.
Samdoesarts Ross draws GUWIEZ, Missupacy
Manga Materials, Telepurte and seller Sara Faber.
And yeah, they all have across all of their channels.
You're looking at 500,000 to 2 million plus followers,
and I was like, All right, I've got almost 700,000 combined right now.
I have the audience to be able to drive this type of engagement and the percentage
necessary to be able to have my patron making the same amount of income.
And so I started out and I was like, All right, I've got a plan.
It's going to take me this many months to be able to get this rise and increase.
And unfortunately, I kind of hit a brick wall.
I only made about half of what I intended to make on the low end,
and I got stuck there.
So to put it numerically, I'm I cannot seem to get above 250 patrons,
and so that's getting a little bit too detailed onto the patrons side.
But to bring this all back brand is the thing.
I eventually realized that I was still missing
with all the artists I mentioned on my whiteboard.
They all had a clear, identifiable brand to them, whereas I didn't,
and I still don't really.
I'm working on that and on that journey.
So when you think of Ross draws, you know exactly what type of art comes to mind
when you think of, as you know, exactly what type of art comes to mind lowish.
Sakimichan, right?
Big Teddy fanart girls.
You know what I mean?
Like you, when you think of Ross draws, it's the bright,
energetic character fan art that he does.
Does super well.
Some of you are probably gonna be
thinking, Oh yeah, it's just, you know, Josh, you're getting too confused.
It's all about just the pretty girls and all that.
It's like, No, no, there's plenty of other artists.
There's artists who are making 7K per month that are doing just these cute
little planner things like, and that's not to put them down.
That's just because I'm not as experienced in that that genre a niche of art,
but I'll put some of them in the.
Description, hopefully, you can find them interesting to research, and so that's
where we get back to Ross when it comes to brand, I think he is a master at it
because he has merged his personal brand with his artwork brand
The Color Dodge, the shiny, the fantasy dynamic colors
and the poses is only made even better by his personality.
Vibrant.
It's always about positivity.
You see smiling all the time.
He's always engaging with his audience,
always doing this, these different challenges and collaborations.
It's just a beautiful harmony
that really, really works together and makes his brand incredibly strong.
And I'm not saying that's the only reason he made the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
Big congrats to him, by the way.
Like that is super exciting to see somebody in this community,
the digital art community,
get to a place of recognition from everyone else in the world.
That's really, really exciting.
I'm also kind of proud.
I feel like I'm in contact with two people who have made the Forbes 30 under 30.
Listen also feel pretty cool.
But besides that, seeing
Ross make that incredible achievement, it really, really
pushed me to want to make this video to share it with you all.
And again, this is a lot bigger than style.
This is not just oh, if you, you know
you've got to keep up the same style, it's it's really, really deep.
You know, looking at it from a personal perspective,
for me, I've been like,
Damn, this is something that I have personally struggled with a lot .
I've always looked at other content creators again.
I want to mention more YouTubers.
one of my favorites to mention is RDCworld1.
And then completely on another side
of the spectrum, you've got the tech YouTubers like iJustine and MKBHD
They never miss their content, always hits.
If you look at I just teens videos from 13, 10 years ago.
She's the exact same woman that she is today.
And I've always found that fascinating.
Look at MKBHD
The exact same guy as a kid, right, is much he's younger than her,
and as a kid, he's the same way that he is now.
It's just it's really
incredible to see that like basically brand.
As a person or as an artist,
it's something that you just do because it's who you are.
And I really feel like
it's especially in the art community because of our desire to succeed
and how how scarce it feels to be able to achieve that.
We we lose track of that and we don't allow ourselves
to really invest in ourselves and in our own work
and in our own self-discovery so that we can begin to stand out
and provide something that people can connect to.
So honestly, if you want to have a solid brand as an artist,
you really shouldn't try to do it at all, because the moment you start to try,
the moment you start to get really analytical,
like I did trying to figure out why is my YouTube channel going down?
Why is it failing? Why is everything?
All the numbers are going down worse than before COVID?
You start to do all these different things
and you start to make some two big mistakes that I won't talk about in
the second that I really want to caution you all not to do
after watching this video.
Please don't do anything.
Don't change anything after watching this video because I know this
knowledge is quite deadly if it comes to you at the wrong time.
So that's why I'm having so many disclaimers at the beginning
so that hopefully you don't make I don't make your life worse or derail
you by watching this video, but I have to continue on with my own brand,
which has been, Hey, I want to become an independent artist.
It's really hard. It's really mysterious.
But I'm going to document the process along the way and share with you guys
what I've learned
so that those of you who are wherever you are in your own journey,
you can come along.
And whenever you find me, I can provide some sort of help for you
so that you can, you know, reach the goals that you want to reach.
So the first one, the first mistake, do not make this
mistake is do not make micro adjustments to what you're doing.
Do not change your art style or change anything after one post
or compare the likes from one post to another.
If you make a video, don't change everything drastically
after one video to another.
You want to make a ton of content, make a lot of things.
Explore and create from within.
And then when you have a conglomerate, a whole assembly of different things,
a group of content that you've put out, then you can start to take a step back
and analyze and start to see how people have responded to it.
Do not make minor adjustments after every single day,
every single five minutes, please.
That is going to absolutely kill
any chance of you developing your brand over the years.
The second thing I really want to mention is that you should not create
with the idea of what other people are thinking at all.
That creation process should start from here inside in your heart
and do not let the outside get in there and contaminated
you want to create from what you have within and do that consistently
so that you can build that relationship with yourself and begin to explore.
So I'm going to use my own experience as an anecdote.
I was doing that because again, I believe that brand is incredibly
natural thing that you can't really mess up
because you're supposed to not try in order to have it.
And so I was doing that when I was growing up
all the way up until college, when I got my first digital art tablet.
Then I started getting really, really focused on DeviantArt,
getting watchers on there.
I wanted to get all the likes and favorites from New Grounds as well,
and I was, man, I was doing all kinds of little things to try to get more attention
and all of the really passionate work I made in high school.
Some of the stuff I wish I could find today
that I was shocked that I made now remembering it is some of it I've lost
and I've realized that damn, I had a theme going about it myself.
I had a really interesting theme and a vibe, and I kind of lost that
lost connection with that.
And I think Adam Duff recently put it incredibly well.
His few recent videos, you should definitely give them a watch or listen.
He said that you need to go find your date at the eighth grade dance
that you have abandoned all those years ago.
That let's say you guys met on the kindred human,
on the playground in kindergarten and you confessed your love to each other.
And it's now you're in eighth grade.
But you don't want to look corny because, you know, maybe
your friends would think you're weird if you start dancing with that person,
but you have to go back to your first love that you had in the playground
in kindergarten and go dance with them and ask them to dance and never let them go.
And that date is going to be your passion and your drive.
Whatever makes you passionate about creating whatever story
that you and only you can tell, you have to go find that.
And it's going to take some effort,
especially depending on how long you might have been led astray from it.
Because if you're like me, you may have been led astray.
You may have never been able to discover that yourself.
So it could be a little bit of a tough journey.
But I think a lot of people do have that and they just
naturally continue to tap into it and they continue to never miss.
I want to use Twitter as an example to a lot of Twitch streamer.
They succeed because they just continue to be themselves
and themselves is exactly what their audience wants from them.
And the moment they start trying to increase and grow,
there is a tendency for them to have an entire
collapse and meltdown because then things start to fall apart
and the very thing that was getting them to the success in the first place.
Now their audiences like, Where is this?
And if you try to ask people, they can't tell you what it is, it's it's
incredibly nuanced your brand, especially if it's personality driven one.
You can describe it because it's just you.
That's you're the description of it.
So please, please
take these two points that I've mentioned to you into consideration.
Do not do these things, do not create from external drives.
Do not analyze everything after every single iteration.
Take the time to just pretty much forget this video even existed.
Forget you even watched it
and go focus on the drive and go discover that drive if you haven't found it yet.
So for me, I am highly looking forward to 2022.
I really feel like I figured out what a lot of my own passionate drive
is going to be in the stories I want to tell in the emotions
that I want my viewers to have.
And I'm looking forward to creating a breadth of work.
I'm not looking forward to any one thing,
but just all the work as a whole that I making in 2022.
And I'm really looking forward
to going to a convention sometime soon, hopefully will be that year as well.
And I can just share everything that I am with everyone
and really get to see how I've impacted you all because I've been starting
to see it's been pretty significant and to see that in person
is something I still dream of.
That's going to be my next highest like, exciting moment.
I think since I got my first 6000 views on my first video that popped off,
that was like 2017.
So I think it's December because I think the third of this month
marked the four year anniversary for my channel. (it was actually earlier)
So, yeah, happy holidays.
I hope this has helped you out a little bit.
I gave you some clarity as being an independent artist.
It's a tough journey.
Also, another disclaimer This is for independent artists.
Pretty much only if you're trying to do freelance.
If you're trying to work in a studio, do not stress about all this stuff.
You need to just go work just like we all do, really,
but you just need to work on your stuff and keep it up.
And if you want to discover your own personal stuff and brand as well,
yeah, that's always going to exist.
You can't really shake it off, but do not get all in a tizzy and go be like,
Oh no, I need it, I need to get popular, I need the brand now.
I need to figure out what it is, and then I'm going to stick to it
and write it down like, no, no, no, no, no.
Again, forget this whole video happened and just take the core message out of it.
Whatever remains that is intangible.
Keep that and forget everything else, because I want your brand
to be pure and untainted and shine vibrantly like Ross.
And again, big congratulations to Ross
and I will see you all in the next one.
Keep trying and stay positive. Peace.