Next Art Goal: Get Paid to Make Art

Dear Reader,
I've been spinning around thinking about what to do next with my art.  I got a into a bit of a mire recently and haven't made more than a few sketches in the last couple of weeks.  Part of the problem is I'm not sure what I should be making.

Today I think my next goal should be to get paid for making art.  Right now I make art and I show it in a few galleries.  I can keep making art to show in galleries.  I pay to put my art in the galleries but that doesn't necessarily mean people will pay to buy the paintings I make.  There must be jobs out there that will pay me to make art; perhaps paint, illustrate, design. Now it's time to see if I can find some.

Social Media and Indecisive Art

Ah, it's time for another weekly installment of the art blog that does not have a readership.  It's actually kind of nice to think about this being out there in the public space of the internet but nobody reads it because there's just so much floating out there that people don't care.  It's a bit like going to the grocery store in ones sweatpants.  You're out in public but nobody really cares.  It's not as if I say anything that's deeply life changing on this blog anyway. If you're not me and you are actually wasting your time reading this right now, that's also fine with me.

Now that I'm done saying that - on to this week's art topic.

Now that I am thinking about how I use social media I am thinking about how there is this pressure to have something really cool to post and to consistently have something really cool to post.  Lately, I feel like my art is floundering around a bit.
I got started in November thinking about getting back into painting.  It had been so long since I had been consistently creating art that I was just happy I could still paint half way decently.
Then I started thinking about what I wanted to paint and how I wanted to paint it.  I felt like I really hit something when I painted "Carver Street Pine" so I wrote down the steps I took when I painted it. The idea was that I could recreate those steps and that could be my painting style.  So I created my next painting that way.
 At first I was happy with it.  Then I decided that idea of applying the same steps to all paintings wasn't working.  Something was missing.  I thought maybe it was the composition.  At that time I just happened to be teaching the rule of thirds (a type of composition) to my students.  Then I found an old booklet at school that I think it meant for high school aged students that talked a little about composition.
I really started thinking about how I am using light and dark areas and where I am putting things in the picture.  I feel very unpracticed in this area.  I think it's setting me back.
I started creating composition sketches and I made a few imaginary desert landscapes.  That seemed to start going in a direction that I wanted to but now that doesn't seem good enough either because working out of the imagination doesn't give me enough to work with although it has something.
Now I'm trying to tweak what I already see with what I am learning about composition.  So it's a combination of real and unreal.  I'm not sure what to make of it.
Here are the current results:

And here's a completely different direction to - hands - in part inspired by the recent drawings of hands by Tayen Kim and one other sketch artist who posts on Instagram.

What am I using social media for? (in relation to art)

I use several different social media sites.  I use Pinterest, Blogger, Instagram, Steller, Facebook, Etsy and Wix.  Often times a social media site will count the number of views, likes, comments or shares on a particular posting.  I begin to get sucked into the idea that these numbers are important and that I need to have as many likes or shares as possible.  The idea is that if a post has more shares or likes it's more popular and this popularity means I am more successful.  Now I want to question this idea.  Does chasing "likes" and "shares" lead to success?  Also, what kind of success am I trying to achieve?

I realize that social media can take up a lot of time in my day if I let it.  In a day I might spend an hour each on Facebook and Instagram and another half hour on my other social media sites.  That means I could be spending two and a half hours a day trying to accomplish something on social media while getting sucked into the idea of counting my "likes".

I need to think more about what I really define as succesful in terms of what I want to do with social media.  In order for me to feel like I'm not being manipulated into wasting my time by the instant gratification of social media I need to first think about what it is I am trying to accomplish.

Here is what I currently would like to use each site for and what I should stop using it for:

Pinterest
Use it for:
- pinning useful ideas for my job
- pinning references for my art work
- pinning books I should read or reference
Stop using it for:
- pinning stuffed animals for other people to repin
- pinning art work I think other people might want to repin

Blogger
Use it for:
- writing down a record my thought processes on the subject of art
Stop using it for:
- writing down what I think other people want to read about
- writing posts that make me sound like a know-it-all

Instagram
Use it for:
- finding artist community
-posting my pictorial meanderings
Stop using it for;
- trying to collect lots of "likes" on my posts
- trying to figure out what is popular

Steller
Use it for:
- (I may decide to stop using this all together)
Stop using it for:
- trying to collect "likes" and "views" on my stories
- trying to figure out what people want to see

Facebook
Use it for:
-Sharing my art with family and friends
Stop using it for:
- A source of world news

Etsy
Use it for:
- possibly as a way to connect with other artists. ( I may stop using this)
Stop using it for:
- Selling crafts and craft supplies

Wix
Use it for:
- A professional website to display finished quality works of art
- A place to direct people to who want to view my professional art
Stop using it for:
- mediocre paintings