Last week I talked about making time to show up. For yourself, your art, and others. Mainly by scheduling time for your art into your calendar.
And that’s what I did. This week I want to talk about what I learned and key takeaways.
Let me preface this by saying, I don’t expect anyone else to work as hard as I do. And this can be HARD.
You know, spoiler alert, we won’t always be ALIVE.
There’s something great about feeling present, in the moment, LIVE. Anything can happen. Being there for each other as much as we can while we’re still here.
Personally, I’m having a lot of fun investing my time in this way, and learning a lot about myself.
I hope at the very least you find it inspiring, and at the most, maybe it gives you some courage to do a little MORE. Get you and work out there.
The 7am Drawing Club Streams
Monday-Friday I was live at 7am for 30 minutes on Youtube. (You can watch replays in this Playlist)
I won’t lie, it kinda sucked to break my usual morning routine of chilling on the couch with books and drawing on the iPad before work… but it was worth it. Wednesday I thought to myself… “is this overkill?” but it was that OTHER voice trying to get me to quit.
In the end, I was right. By pre-scheduling these streams, prioritizing them as an important meeting, I incentivized myself to show the fuck up.
We probably averaged about 10 people watching live, but many familiar names from the Daily Drawing Club.
Day 6 (Saturday) was a “members only” stream. I went a bit more behind the scenes with how I organize my ideas, and a challenge to myself this week that we’ll check in on next week.
Added gains from doing this???
We gained 5 new members to the “Daily Drawing Club” - as of writing this we’re at 141. (Join!)
3 of those committed to the annual membership. Locked in!
Brand Discoverability: I know at least 1 new member for sure discovered the live randomly on Youtube. And someone shouted out how great the vibe was over on Twitter/X compared to “negative” art streams.
Uptick in our merch sales this week, keeping Ally busy! :D
Youtube growth: I haven’t published regularly there since fall. So this week alone my views are up 45%, watch time hours increased 39%, and gained 61 new subscribers which is 15% more than the previous week.
Interesting data I can use: I’m able to see the points where people re-watch or fast forward to. These are signals to make more content like that. For example, if more people are watching me draw hair? I might want to do my version of how I draw hair video.
4 of the 5 live videos broke over 100 views. Which my Youtube expert friends say that the majority of videos uploaded to youtube don’t get over 100 a views.
A few DMs and live comments thanking me for doing the show. This always means a lot to me. Or a nice comment today from Steph in the live chat saying this club makes her so happy. THAT’S the big win for me.
And those are just what I can see and read.
Even on the mornings where I was dragging my ass a bit… I felt so much better once I did it. I was super energized for my day.
Being LIVE is Contagious
At least for me. It’s also a big part of my new job. We do live-streams for VeeFriends Comics a few times a week officially. I usually do 90 minute sessions of working on the comics and talking to fans live. I’m basically putting the plan from my “Future of Comics” video into action. I want to be living proof that it works.
When the 90 minutes were up I’d find myself still drawing afterward and thinking, well why didn’t I just stay live? So I ended up doing some “secret streams” on my TikTok @djcoffman , where I’m comfortable listening to background music without getting flagged 😂
All told last week, in different sessions, I was live and accessible to fans or my art friends for 15 hours.
What now? Let’s keep it going!
I heard from a lot of you who said they’ve love to join live in the evenings, so for the Drawing Club Streams next week we’ll move to 8pm.
Here’s the full schedule for “week 10” of 2024. Also includes the streams for VeeFriends if you want to watch me do deep work on comics.
Here’s the REAL secret…
It might seem like a lot of work, but it’s actually EASIER for me to just go live and document what I’m doing while I work. No special editing. Setup was minimal. Now that I have a decent setup, I can go live in seconds and have multi-screen shots going on. All things I had to take some time to learn, but nothing that was HARD to learn.
AND ACCOUNTABILITY. If I’m locked into a deep work stream for 90 minutes, it keeps me drawing. No rabbit holes to fall into. I get more done in those 90 minutes that zoning out on some show playing in the background, or procrastinating.
SEND YOUR QUESTIONS FOR THE STREAMS!!
Hey, I like to do a “question of the day” and answer live while I’m drawing. You can ask anything art related, tools, career, craft, storytelling. E-mail your questions to dj@drawordieclub.com and I will answer live!
🔥Today’s Drawing CHALLENGE!
Today’s daily drawing prompt from the daily club is…
Gonna make it a LYRICS THEME week over in the Daily Drawing Club…
Draw what you think about first, and put it out there for people to see! (maybe livestream it!)
✏️☠️♣️HEY! Join the DAILY CLUB!!!
$5 bucks a month gets you some nice perks, AND like I mentioned I’m doing some members only streams where I go even deeper into my process or thoughts. I can be a little more candid there. JOIN UP!
I’ll see you soon…
☠️ Draw or Die MERCH!
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