Thanks to some encouragement from my facebook friends I have recently joined them on Instagram. I was resistant to it at first, because I’m already involved in Facebook and Pinterest and blogging. Plus it meant starting another separate email account. I thought the last thing I needed is another social media.
Instagram reminds me of back when I first started blogging and met the community of fellow artists bloggers. We would spend the week visiting and commenting on each other’s blog, supporting each other. I shut down my comment section here on my blog a few years ago as it was filled with spam and more spam. It became a chore to visit artists blogs and the conversations stopped. I once again feel a part of the on-line artist community. It’s been exciting to get back in touch with my old blogging buddies and it’s like I just talked to them yesterday.
Facebook took over but within a few years my newsfeed became bogged down with random things I didn’t want to read about; and you had to pay and pay and pay to get your own content out there. If you have an artist Facebook account you know what I mean. On Instagram you can find EVERYTHING you follow in your feed. You know your followers are really following you. They talk to me again, I talk to them again. Artists generally keep their process to themselves – so for me, in Instagram, I found a way to see that again. I love it. I’m inspired by it. And encouraged to try new things. I’m sketching and collaging and painting in new ways.
And it’s nice that it’s installed on my phone so I don’t have to go home and sit uncomfortably at my computer. I can get a creative boost whenever I want it. “Liking” there is easy, you feel you are actually contributing something back to them. I can see what my friends ‘liked’; they see what I ‘like’; and the community of artist ripples out into a brand new unchartered sea of mutual artist support.
I post different kinds of art which I don’t always share on Facebook on my Instagram page, so if you’ve got an account, please come check it out! I’m @jacquelynlberl.
