 Hello there, it's Sandy Alnach. Welcome to 2022. I am back from my sabbatical in December and excited to get the new year underway, but not so excited that I'm gonna do a frenzied crazy video. This is gonna be just me painting and chatting with you about some changes that I'm gonna be making coming up that I think you're gonna be excited about. Although I might be the only one excited about having a new YouTube intro. I'm one of those weirdos who embraces change. I kind of like when things get all shaken up and my thinking gets rearranged and I can't do things the way I did. So I've gotta find a new normal for how I'm gonna move forward. And there's been some changes in me artistically, some changes in you as a community and some changes in my business. And I want to find ways to embrace those changes and make it work for all three areas. I've done lots and lots of journaling and I thought it might be helpful to give you a little perspective on what I'm thinking by sharing my three goals for 2022. The first one is rest. I want to start to live a less frenzied pace artistically in my life, in my spirituality, in friendships, in everything. I just want to not be running from one thing to the next. I've been doing three videos a week for years here on YouTube and I feel like I'm always running from one thing to the other and changing something and then there's a blog hop and then there's this and then that and a new release and I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel. My pastor is doing a sermon series on rest, on trusting, you're walking in what God wants for you. It's gonna be okay. You don't have to be the one doing it all because if you're walking and you're calling, things are gonna happen the way they're supposed to happen. And I feel like I've been trying to force things to happen for way too long and I want to just rest and trust the process. The second bucket that I am putting things into is the growth bucket. I want to grow artistically. I want to grow spiritually. I want to grow as an entrepreneur. I want to grow as a friend. Heck, I want to grow houseplants. I want to not kill houseplants. I want to grow and if I'm following what I'm supposed to be doing, then that growth is going to be happening. So if I can pair the rest and the growth together, I think I could be in a really good place. The third bucket is play. I want to become like a little kid again. I want to have fresh eyes for my art for the mediums. I want to just lay it all out on the table and start to play with it and not worry about filming absolutely everything. I just want to explore and become that little child who's just full of wonder when they see the color and they don't care if anybody likes what they're doing, they just do it. I really want to lean into that kind of creativity in this new year. In addition to me changing, you're changing as a community. It's been really interesting to read the results of the survey that I posted in November, thanks to the thousands of you who replied, it was really eye-opening to read all those results. And I want to just give you my top line for what I have learned about you from those surveys based on the last survey that I did about two years or so ago and the changes that I've seen. And there was another survey I did two years before that and I looked at all of those to see where the community has been moving. First is you as an audience. You're becoming more art-centric. Your focus seems to be more on the shading and the color and all that sort of thing rather than here's a stamp and I want to learn how to color that stamp in particular. You're learning and wanting to learn bigger ideas that you can apply to all of the kinds of art that you do, which is great. The eclectic I added in here because the mediums that you're using have changed drastically. It used to be two thirds to three quarters of my followers were always alcohol marker users. And I have really been astounded to see that Copic markers are only just slightly now ahead of watercolor and colored pencil, which are tied there within spitten distance of each other. And both of those are within spitten distance of alcohol markers. Either you're starting to broaden out and learning more things about other mediums or more people are coming in who are fans of those other mediums. I don't know which, I don't know if I'm the driver of that since I'm using them more, but I'm excited by it. I'm also excited to see that there's a contingent of pen and ink users as well because I love using my pen and ink and it's exciting to know that there's some people out there who love that just like I do. Secondly, I've learned from the survey about your struggles. Your biggest challenges are finding enough time to do what you wanna do and enough practice at what you're trying to gain your skills in. Time and practice are something artists have always struggled with. And throughout this year, I wanna talk more about living a creative lifestyle. How do we do that on a daily basis so that we get that time set aside that we can put into our art? And what kind of exercises do we need to do to practice and to get our hand and our mind and our eyes and everything coordinated so that when we're sitting down to do that epic project, we've got all that practice under our belt. The other struggle that showed up a lot was just one big category I'll call the head game. It's all of the things that we tell ourselves that are really not true but we tell ourselves them anyway, I can't do it, I'm not good enough to do it. I'm not an artist because I don't get paid to do it. I'm not an artist because I didn't go to school for it. Those interior conversations we have with ourselves that cause us to just put a big roadblock between us and where we wanna go artistically. And a lot of that, I don't know how to fix and not a therapist but I will talk about that from time to time and try to help shake our minds loose of some of those thoughts. I'll be doing it for myself cause I have my own issues as well in those areas but it's something we all struggle with as artists. Third thing I learned about you was your desires the things that you want more of. And as usual, technique was at the top of the list but only a quarter of you put technique at the very top this time. Usually it's about half. So what else has filled in the rest of it? A lot of people want to learn how to freehand, draw and paint. A lot of people want to grow in their realism in what they're creating. And an awful lot of you, I was very surprised wanna learn how to make things that are worthy of a frame. You wanna be able to put it on the wall. Some of you wanna go and sell that and get to that level but a lot of you just wanna be able to put it on the wall in your own house. Those are the kinds of things I can help you with. That's my sweet spot. The kinds of things that I already do and that I love and that I'm passionate about are the kinds of things that are also gonna help you reach your goals. That brings us to business changes and I'm not gonna bore you with tons of stuff that's going on behind the scenes but I wanna mention one thing and that is affiliate links. You make a purchase and the person gets a percentage of the sale, no cost to you. And it's one way that a lot of artists support themselves. Well, what I found out last fall was that one of the companies that I linked to a ton all the time has a system set up where if you don't have cookies turned on then that affiliate information gets stripped out and lots of you turn your cookies off and how do I know you have your cookies off? It's because my monthly sales with that company went down to 15% of what they used to be. So yeah, I know you don't turn your cookies on. I don't turn mine on either. All of those sales are not getting credited to the people that you think they're getting credited to. What I'm gonna end up changing going forward is linking to places where I know I'm going to be able to get that percentage because that's why I do it. It supports the work that I do. I'm not gonna change my old videos. I'm just gonna change things moving forward and I just make the recommendation to you if you're purchasing something and you want to use that affiliate link just turn cookies on for that website, for that purchase because it really helps artists to buy paint and brushes and things that they need for their work. And now for the exciting plans for 2022 here on YouTube. I'm gonna spend a week on a topic. Yes, a week. No more of this flitting from one thing on Monday, another thing on Wednesday, another thing on Friday. But I'm gonna start in my head in my planning with the Friday video. That's gonna be what I'm calling a big idea video. It's whatever I feel like making. I'm gonna indulge my play time. I might make some epic giant piece. It might be something small that you can copy and create one of your own. It might be something that no one in their right mind is gonna do. Maybe I'll get the Dremel out. I don't really know. And then I'm gonna start to build the rest of the content for the week. Monday, I'm gonna have a deep dive on some portion of the big idea video. It might be taking a texture and blowing that out in a couple of different mediums. It might be a color combination that gets flowed out into a whole bunch of different ways. It might be all flowers because the big idea was flowers. So the whole week will be full of flowers. Hard to say what that's gonna be. I'm gonna let myself do something different every week just to keep it interesting for me because I get bored easily. Then on social media during the week, I'm gonna post other versions, something else stemming from the deep dive. And I'm just gonna let things flow. I will use different mediums all week long. I might do cards sometimes, sketches other times. Who knows? You'll just have to tune in to see what's gonna happen. On Thursdays, I always do tiny tutorials and I will do one of those on the same subject. And not only will I do that on my Sandy All-Knock Instagram account, I'm gonna also do that on Sandy All-Knock Fine Art. Did you know I had two Instagram accounts? Well, the Fine Art one is a more serious type of account, much more serious types of pieces. The Sandy All-Knock one is where I post silly stuff sometimes. I post cards, I do teach tons on there. But if you're looking for something without so much goofiness, Fine Art one is definitely a place to go and follow. On Friday, when the big idea video posts, I'm also going to have a blog post summarizing links for all the other stuff that I did that week on that topic. So if you missed some things, don't worry about it. You can just go to the blog on Fridays and nab some links to those things. What I also wanna do is give you play time. So during the week, if you post some interesting experiments that we can all learn from, on Friday I will be linking to your social media or your blog or wherever. So make sure you tag me so I have links to what you're doing and I'll pick out a few of them each week to include in the big idea blog post. A few other plans that I have, I'm gonna continue making new classes. I've got some website updates that didn't get done in December that are gonna happen at some point. I'm gonna start also having artist features occasionally and Friday is gonna be the first one. So please tune in to come and meet Lynn. And I'm also just gonna tease you right now. I have a new app coming. I have developed it and built it. And I am waiting on just the craziness of approvals from the Apple store. And I'm gonna be shouting it from the rooftops as soon as it's available. So hang tight, it will be coming. I will see you on Friday. In the meantime, happy new year.