How You Should Show Your Work

Hi there! I left my personal notes about this topic while moving elsewhere. So, I’m rebuilding and recalling what I wrote and hope it still makes sense and resonate with what I initially wrote. Tons of stuff has been going on, but I have to keep on moving :)

How do You Actually Show Your Work

A lot of artists (including me) often ask the same question as Austin’s readers ask him. Most of the questions are related to self-promotion such as:

• How do I get my stuff out there?

• How do I get noticed?

• How did you do it?

The answer is simple. According to comedian Steve Martin, you have to be so good that people can’t ignore you.

Of course, not all the time everyone gets to notice you even if you’re so good. There are many creatives that deserve such audience but has a hard time getting people to notice them. It’s a hard task to do with putting the work to show it to everyone and focusing on getting good at the same time.

Personally, I struggle with both getting good and promoting my stuff at the same time. There are times that my Facebook art page gets dormant as I try tons of ways to make my presentation look good, but then I end up procrastinating a lot and the creation process gets stale.

The Easy Way to Show Your Work and Getting Good at the Same Time

If you hate the idea of self-promoting, consider this from what Austin learned from people whom he look up to:

• Look into your favorite artists and other people who you look up to. What do you notice? Most of them don’t have time to party and gain network. But instead, they make use of the network through sharing bits of their work online by sharing ideas and their knowledge.

• Your favorite artists are probably open and consistently share things what they learned online and posting these for others to see. They don’t stay and hide in their own spaces to maintain secrecy and hoard their work and knowledge, but instead they show it to everyone.

They are showing their work. They aren’t afraid of being open as they have been open to become interested and attract the right people. They know that being good isn’t good enough. They have to be findable if they want to be found. This is why people will come to you if you are generous enough to share what you know and what they find useful as they will become your leverage when you need it, whether be it for fellowship, feedback, or patronage.

What’s In It For You and Me?

Austin Kleon’s book contains lots of cool stuff that doesn’t fall on self-promotion. His book proposes the alternative way of self-promotion that gets you how to think about your work as a never-ending process, how to share your process in a way that it will attract the right audience as well as those who might be interested in what you do, and finally, how to take punches in the real world as an artist.

All we have to do is show our work. That’s how we do it.

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