100 posts later: why blogging as an artist?

I just realised I passed the 100 posts mark. Achievements call for celebration and I also think it is a good time to look back and reflect on what I learned since I started the blog.

So, why blogging as an artist?

• Sharing your art: The first advantage of a blog is the possibility to share your art with many people. Some excellent artists’ blogs just do that very well, like Urban Painter William Wray, Ed Terpening with his blog Life Plein Air or Rob Ijbema with his Painting Wales Diary.



• Reaching out and making contact: I am still amazed by the visits I receive from so many different countries. Writing a blog is a good way to get out of your sandbox and see with your own eyes that, as Thomas Friedman put it, "The World is flat" (The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century )
  



• Getting feedback: People can post comments on your blog. You can also asked questions while you built an audience. A blog is an easy way to start the dialogue.
  



• Making you accountable: A common advice when it comes to achieving your goal is to share them (for a good article on goal setting, see: Goal-Setting: The 90-Day Challenge by Michael Hyatt). You can do that with your blog and you can also report on progress your making towards these goals.



• An artistic diary: I am using the blog as a diary of what I paint and what I am reading. If I share good websites or articles with my reader on the blog, I also get an easy way for me to retrieve them later. On a more down to earth side, if I failed to update my paintings inventory for some time, I can use the blog to track the paintings I need to enter into my records.



• Expanding and testing out your thoughts: The journaling function of a blog is important. A blog is a good place to launch ideas, let them mature and come back to them later to refine your vision. You can write a series of short post entries and then use them to build a larger article for your website. If you take this to the extreme, writing blog articles is a great way to write a book one building block at a time.



• Seeing what you accomplished: Looking back and seeing what I have done is key to keeping my motivation up. I just need to look at the menu and the many entries on the blog to know that, every single week, I have done something to move my art forward.
  

Art blog Blogging William Wray Ed Terpening Life Plein Air Rob Ijbema Painting Wales Diary
Picasso Painting Art quote