Thursday 2 March 2017

You Heard It Here First...

So, I have a few little mini-announcements to make. I've got over 2,500 subs on YouTube now, which is beyond anything I ever expected, and this month is my one year anniversary of this iteration of my YouTube presence :) I will be doing some anniversary giveaways - watch this space.

If you've not already seen it, I looked at the 35 new Schmincke colours yesterday - this (below this post) video's already been really popular and I think a lot of people are enamoured by Phthalo Sapphire (PB15:6 - the same as the Phthalo Sapphire that Winsor and Newton had in their Desert Collection) - but were struggling to find it in their area or at a good price - I've seen today that you can buy that at Jackson's as they have plenty of stock, AND they ship worldwide for reasonable prices - plus these are some killer reductions for a brand new release, right?!:

Full Pan (RRP £8.00, £6.30)
Half Pan (RRP £6.00, £4.24)
5mL Tube (RRP £6.00, £4.42)
15mL Tube (RRP £11.00, £8.74)

I wanted to let you all know about a few NEW THINGS I'm trialling to help my audience even more! I was going to do a Spin Doctor Speaks video but I decided to write it instead - I wanted to watch TV at the same time ;) I often have the TV on in the background when painting just for not having silence, or I listen to music sometimes - I did see in the comments on one of The Frugal Crafter's videos last week that a few of you like to listen to audiobooks when you're painting, which sounds like a great idea and one I am going to be trying. I noticed Amazon USA has a deal on right now for 2 free audiobooks if you sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of Audible, which I thought would be worth sharing with you all? It seems Amazon UK has a similar deal with 1 free audiobook if you sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of Audible.

The Spin Doctor's Emporium
Sadly, this is only really of use to my Amazon.com-using (USA, mostly) peeps, but it will help y'all a lot! I've set up an online store with Amazon (you can see an embryonic version - totally unformatted - under "Emporium" on my navigation bar at the top of my website) which allows me to annotate products and help direct you to things that might be useful. For example, for those who follow my Surgery series of watercolour lessons, each week's supplies will have a store page to help you grab them really quick with no effort, if you need to restock your colours. I'm going to use this to help guide you through things like which colours you need in palettes for different uses - once it goes live properly, I'll make a formal announcement on YouTube.

Postmortems with The Spin Doctor
Yeah, yeah, it's morbid, but we all have those paintings from time to time where we just don't know why it went wrong, right? You can get professional 1:1 feedback on your paintings from some online sources for up to £30 per session (US$50), but sometimes you only need to hear "you used too much water", and then it's not worth paying it. So in this new series, you will be able to submit your paintings to me online and I will show them (without names/etc!!!) on screen and talk through my thoughts for maybe 1-2 minutes on each one, once a month and only one painting per person per month. I'm going to do it to see how it goes - but if I get 500 paintings in the first month, I'm quitting right away!

The Spin Doctor's Atelier
I have a thing for flowery English and I call rooms in my appartment my "front parlour", "bedchamber" and so on, because it makes me laugh - so my studio can be an "atelier", right? (Ah TELL ee ay) In this series I'll be letting you watch me create - a little like The Spin Doctor Sits, but that's more about trying other peoples' methods/ideas to see how they work for me - but this is more about original material.

The Spin Doctor's Clinic
This is going to be a LIVE Q&A/quick-tips-demo where you ask questions and I answer them/show you things quickly - anything can happen! It'll only be once or twice a month at most until I get a feel for how useful folk are finding it.








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