Benefits of stepping away from the noise
About
Overexposure to social media can influence the creative process. This effect can be both challenging and motivating for artists, whether or not we’re just starting out. It’s something I also experience with Chromakane, and here I am shedding light on how I’ve found my right balance with social media.
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‘Thoughts Become You 03’
feeling Guilty yet?
More and more, artists with a social presence are apologising for not posting enough online. Even if we’ve only missed a day, or a week or two, we still get that lingering feeling that we need to be more present. While this feeling isn’t completely normal, it has been normalised. Social media is the go-to for businesses looking to get more eyes on what they do. And as creatives, being able to tell our stories and share the process behind our art so transparently can feel very rewarding, making us more relatable and bringing us closer to our audience. But just like any other discipline, creatives also need time to create – from processing ideas to translating them into products and services. Our creative processes may not always be suited to the fast-paced and all-consuming nature of social media.
In the beginning, I loved sharing my art on Instagram. Engagement was consistently high, and with that came new opportunities for sales, partnerships, and incentive to keep going. But with time my art style began to evolve, as it should have: I began experimenting with new techniques and mediums, used more colour and started to lean towards a more pop art aesthetic which broke away from my previously illustrative blackwork style. Then engagement began to dwindle. I chalked it up to people simply not liking my new work. But in reality, maybe it was just the AI-driven algorithm being unhappy about being fed something different, such as new captions and hashtags paired with a changing posting schedule. Hard to know for sure – but easy to take personally! I became convinced that I had to be creating a certain type of post, or style of image, in order to see any growth. And that felt counter-intuitive because, in an ideal world, experimenting and evolving is exactly how I wanted to track my artistic growth. It’s how I know my work feels dynamic, relevant and exciting.
Is familiarity all that comforting?
In my mind, creating art and content to keep up with my social media feed felt mechanical and exhausting. I was creating new work driven by a content creation checklist: everything would need to feel ‘the same, but different’ to keep followers and the algorithm happy. This process made me question whether people truly always want to see similar things. From timeless cat memes to TikTok’s dance culture on infinite scroll, familiarity has never seemed more comforting. We may be creatures of habit, but surely, isn’t the challenge of the unknown more enticing? Asking myself this, what I began to crave was the ability to slow down and explore new themes, concepts and stories for my collections – something which would hopefully keep people feeling just that, excited and inspired to push themselves.
Online creative communities are bustling: there is so much talent and inspiration to explore at our fingertips that there couldn’t be a better time to be an artist. Though with this bustling nature comes saturation: as we know, the online space is crowded and noisy, filled with relentless sharing, scrolling and consumption of content. Some of us thrive in this fast-paced bustle, but not all of us are cut out for it. And when that’s the case, we need to learn to consume it with moderation. With that realisation, I stepped away from it. Taking a break from social media to reset isn’t something that necessarily resolves itself within a matter of hours. In my case, it took a few months to detach myself from that mental loop, and to figure out a new approach for art creation which was entirely de-influenced by social media’s pace and trends. As much as following trends for social media virality may be synonymous with success for many businesses, I personally couldn’t figure out how it would make sense for my own art creation – so I started exploring ideas for new collections which could create comfort and familiarity in their own way.
‘Thoughts Become You’, an de-influenced collection
The ‘Thoughts Become You’ series was the first I created in an attempt to de-influence my creative process: wanting to step away from social media, I was keen to find a new way to approach creative ideation without it being a part of the process. What this thinking allowed me to understand was that the most important aspect for me was creating experiences for people, who could use my artworks as a playground for self-expression and storytelling. I wanted to find a way to reconnect with these people, within a crowded and saturated online space where my voice felt lost. It seems like a given, and how it should always be. But as creative people in the social media age, we are more or less driven by emotional thinking, making it easy to get wrapped up in all the noise. We need to learn to cut through it and almost settle into it, even if uncomfortably, finding new ways and techniques to better apply our creative thinking alongside it.
At the end of the day, social media hits everyone a little differently. The general consensus though is that we should take healthy breaks away from not only creating and sharing content, but from consuming it too, before we let it consume us. And most importantly, as with every aspect of creativity, we should always allow an element of experimental play where we aren't taking ourselves too seriously. ✺
‘Thoughts Become You 01’
‘Thoughts Become You 02’
‘Thoughts Become You 04’
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