Social Media Growth in 2024: 100 Days of Art

Results and Honest Review

Today I want to share my experience posting my art on social media for 100 days straight in 2024.

For as long as I can remember, all I wanted was to become a full-time artist. When I began the 100-day challenge, I set out to post a variety of art that included pencil drawings, ink art, and watercolors to showcase my different strengths. Then I began creating abstract landscape paintings that opened up a new side of my creative expression.

My approach to creating a new piece was researching different landscapes, building a library of places that felt meaningful and mesmerizing to me, and then painting each landscape entirely from memory until the piece captured the feeling I wanted to translate.

My strategy was to absorb the vision, fully feel it, and then bring it to life.

I thought, if I could just make people feel and experience these locations without hyper-focusing on perfecting form, I would consider my artistic goal reached.

Over the course of the challenge, I painted the Rocky Mountains, tropical scenes, colorful deserts, Icelandic terrain (including a volcano), foggy rolling hills, winding roads, Scandinavian highlands, valleys, wildflower landscapes, surrealistic scenes, and more.

The Results

So how did I do in terms of reach, likes, and subscribers?

I want to preface this by saying I started posting my art when the social media algorithms changed and had become more restrictive. Unfortunately, it was a very hard process to get reach on many of the platforms.

I started with 0 followers and after the challenge, these were the most not-worthy results:

Instagram: 241          YouTube: 122          TikTok: 116 

Despite the slow growth, I appreciate everyone who has decided to join me on my journey. I continued to share my work daily to keep my promise to myself and see if I could consistently post for 100 days straight.

Lessons Learned

I may not have gained a huge following but here is what I did gain:

1) Platform Preferences: I learned that YouTube and TikTok were my favorite social platforms and that I would no longer put as much effort into Instagram. I will now treat Instagram as a portfolio/gallery.

2) New Art Style: I honed a new art style that’s unique to me. I love what I created and felt myself developing and mastering different ways of mixing and layering paint to get the desired atmospheric effects I wanted as well as achieving depth and movement in my pieces.

3) Happiness in Letting Go: I found joy in letting go of perfection. For years I was focused on realism, which I still love but it drove me crazy at times. Realism is not as forgiving as abstraction. It demands perfection and sometimes an overwhelming amount of rendering and hyperfocus on one piece that can lead to burnout.

4) Kind Sentiments: I gathered a small following and every time I read a comment I did a little happy dance. Many people told me my paintings made them feel calm and comforted. These comments are priceless to me. As an artist, one of my brand values is creating family-friendly art that supports salubrious living. I always aim to create art that is good for the mind, heart, and soul. I want my pieces to bring a sense of calm, comfort, and nostalgia into my collector’s homes.

5) Artistic Achievement: I reached my artistic goal. My favorite comments were that I made people feel calm and comforted and someone even said they could “feel the weather” in my paintings. To the people who said these things, you made me one happy artist!

6) Medium Preferences: I learned that my favorite medium to work with is acrylic paint because of its quick drying time, durability, and also because of the outstanding color vibrancy of high-quality acrylic paint.

7) Dream Big: I realized that my dream of being a full-time artist has grown deeper, and I’m committed to pursuing it until it works out.

Next Steps

After the challenge, I had to take a little break from social media to refocus and plan my next steps. I decided to work on finding the best possible printing service for my pieces and launch my new website wildhoodshop.com

Moving forward, I plan to continue creating, posting on YouTube, and blogging whenever I can. I love taking requests, so if you dig my style and want to see me paint something specific, please drop a comment on my YouTube or TikTok.

As a token of my appreciation, I am offering a free gift when you subscribe to the email newsletter on my website. Scroll down to the very bottom of my website to find the email sign-up form. Once you submit your email, the digital art file will automatically download.

To everyone who has supported me by purchasing my art and photography, or by liking, commenting, and subscribing, I am so appreciative. Please say hi and let me know where you’re from if you haven’t already. I love hearing from people all over the world.

With love,

A Grateful Artist