30 in 30 - "Time Capsule", "Olives" and "Hieroglyphs" Abstract Art

First post of 2016. Happy New Year, everyone! Looking back on the past year, I've accomplished a couple of things that I wanted to get done. I've been blogging for about two years now, on and off, and I've started to get more serious with it late last year. I wanted to average at least one blog post per week, which I've done. This year, I'd like to do more in the way of tutorials and posts that people might learn something from. 

But first, I'd like to try the 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge again. It's been a while since the last time I tried, but it would be good to get back into the habit of seriously trying to create something new every day. I know I can do it, I've done it before, I just have to make sure I do it now.

I've been a bit undecided about what I want to create for this month's challenge, so I might mix it up a bit as I go, and experiment with different abstracts, portraits, whatever strikes my fancy. We'll see what happens.

Day 1

"Time Capsule", January 2016, Acrylic Paint

Day 2

"Olives", January 2016, Oil Pastel

Day 3

"Hieroglyphs", January 2016, Oil Pastel

I'll probably put a couple of artworks on each blog post if I don't have much to say about them. That makes it easier than making a blog post every single day."

Like Renee Dillon Art on Facebook, Maybe You'll Get to See Some Art

I just added a gadget to the blog so that people can click a button and easily Like my Facebook page for Renee Dillon Art. Though, after reading a few articles about how fan pages on Facebook work, I don't know why I bothered. Facebook makes so much sense as a resource. It's a place a lot of people go every day to see things that entertain them. They can customize the things that come up to be of most interest to them. Or at least they should be. These days, it seems, a vast majority of items on the news feed are ads. And they're not even well targeted ads. They're not even ads that interest me. Isn't that the whole point?

Apparently many of the people who Like your page (with the intention of receiving updates from you) don't see your posts at all, unless you pay Facebook to reach a larger portion of your audience. I could understand advertising to reach new fans, but paying to reach current ones? That's absurd. So now I'm not even sure if I should put that much effort into my Facebook profile. 

Everyone who talks about online marketing stresses the importance of creating an email mailing list - that getting a person's email is the only real true way of capturing them in such a way that you don't lose them when a social network goes under. But that's not the way I engage with the people I want to interact with. I follow people on Youtube, I Like artists on Facebook, I pop in and out of blogs that I've bookmarked. It never occurs to me that I want updates emailed to me about the things I'm interested in or want to see. Because email is full of spam, and I believe that a large proportion of people only have emails these days because you need them to sign up for other websites.

My email inbox contains over 900 unread emails. Most of them are things that I might have genuinely interested in at one point. But the companies trying to sell me something all blend together, the clickbait titles lose their appeal and suddenly it's all just a shade of uninteresting beige advertising that I'm not bothered to even open.

So how are we supposed to find our fans, and retain them? How do we make sure the people that we want to entertain, teach, enlighten and inspire can actually hear us, now and in the future? To be honest, I don't really have a good answer to that. All I can suggest is to grab as many people as you can now, in as many places as possible, and hope that they have enough passion for what you do to try and find you if your method of communication falls apart. It's not ideal, but it's all we have. And even if they don't find you again, just hope that what short period of time you could reach them left some kind of positive impact on their life.

"Turbulence", Acrylic Paint on Paper

Well, now that rant is out of the way, here's another of my new abstracts. This one is called "Turbulence". I'm still not really figuring out this whole abstract art thing, but I have decided to start trying to make my painterly abstracts into mirrored, symmetrical designs like my previous geometric abstracts. I'll see how I like that after I've tried a few. There should be a post about it soon.

Also, despite my earlier rant, if you want to Like Renee Dillon Art on Facebook I really would appreciate it. For all I know, you will get updates. Maybe they'll change the way you can interact with your fans, maybe they already have, I don't know. Either way, click the Like button in the Facebook widget at the side if you're interested. Thanks for looking. :)

30 Paintings in 30 Days - Final Thoughts

So, Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge is finally over for the month of January. I might not have completed 30 finished paintings, as was my original plan, but I did make 22 blog posts, as well as some other art experiments or unfinished pieces that didn't get posted at all. So overall, I'm happy with my effort, and want to compound upon it in future. 

My next rather ambitious goal is to see if I can work on art for at least one hour per day for the whole month of February. That's 28 hours total. I wonder how much I'll actually be able to create in that time. More than if I wasn't pushing myself, that's for sure. My main aim is to set aside a period of time in which I'm not allowed to get distracted by other things. Hopefully it will also encourage me to work faster so I have something to blog about at the end of each session, rather than sit there pondering colour palettes or mediums.

Here are some of the things I didn't get around to posting this month.

Digital Layout of Abstract

Digital Layout of Abstract

Work in Progress of Flower Painting, Need to Add Detail with Pens, Pencils etc.

You might see more of these in future. Or I might get distracted and work on other things. But I thought they belonged here as part of the record of the month anyway.