When you look back at things you've done a long time ago, which at the time felt a bit random and pointless and you didn't know what it was leading towards and then you look at the work that you end up doing two years later. Hello everybody and welcome back to Art Juice. This is episode 111 of honest, generous and humorous conversations that will feed your creative soul and get you

thinking with me Alice Sheridan and me Louise Fletcher.

So this week we have a subject which is quite close to my heart but hasn't always been it has to be said

this is something that I used to be rather terrified of we are going to be talking about sketchbooks.

Yay! Yay! or grown or fear or guilt or something around sketchbooks.

So we're going to be talking about that, how we use them,

journals in our work, all the kind of different ways that they might feed into it. But before that,

what's your week looked like? What have you been working on?

We started some new paintings, actually as a result of my sketchbook, but I'll get to that. So I've started some 12 inch paintings. I had my neighbor's little boy do some work for me,

sanding back old panels that I had not used. So I've got about probably 12 or 14 12 inch panels, most of them not even cradle, just flat bits of wood.

And he sanded them all back so they're all smooth. And so I've had a really good time painting over those and creating a new series that I'm really excited about and that are quite different from what I've been doing before.

And funnily enough, I painted over something something we often get this question about owning you know how do you let go of things that you love and there was one painting which was the very first abstract

painting I did and I was very attached to it just because it was the first time I

realized I could do that and this week it was one of the ones that got painted over because I finally feel I'm okay to just say goodbye now because it wasn't very good and but I was just hanging on to it out

sentimentality. So I'm doing that, but the other thing I wanted to mention because it might be of interest to other people is in the last few weeks, last few months actually, I've worked more consistently on putting things on YouTube and having a plan and a strategy for using YouTube because I've noticed

Instagram is just painfully difficult to build an audience on these days and Facebook is okay but it's always grown at about the same rate and I was just looking at my YouTube stats and in the last month my

Instagram generally grows 12% it has done for years it grows 12% every month. Sometimes it's 10 sometimes it's 14.

That's pretty good you know though. Yeah it's quite good. You know it's a steady growth

YouTube since I started paying attention per month subscribers are at 50% and

views on my videos are up 150% and all I've done is one weekly YouTube video. That's it. And I put the same video on

on Instagram afterwards and it doesn't have anywhere near the impact that it has on YouTube.

So I just thought it's interesting to see and really engaged people, lots of comments, people joining the waiting list for my course.

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