 Well, hello and happy new year. It's Sandy Allnock and I have some new goodies from Daniel Smith. They sent me five new colors of paint and I'm gonna do a wash and ink today, keeping it easy, keeping it light and talking about delight. But before I get started, I wanna let you know I'm not looking at what I am putting on screen. I'm just sitting here with my microphone talking and telling stories and then I will edit the video on top of that. So don't expect that this is gonna be a play by play. But the colors that I'm using, as I said, were gifted from Daniel Smith and I will have more on the blog if you're looking for specific swatches of them and the properties, et cetera, will be listed over on my blog. But I decided I would just play with the colors, kind of let them run across the page, see what happens, do some fun things with pouring water on it and then some pen and ink work because I thought that would be a nice relaxing way to start the new year just some taking some delight in color and line. So speaking of delight, delight is my word for 2023. 2023 is a new brand shiny spanking new year and I am just happy to kick 2022 to the curve. I don't know if anybody else is, but let me tell you a little about where 2022 even came from and what I learned from it that has led me to the word delight for this year. So in 2019, 2020, I guess it was, I started noticing some things changing in my business because I depended partially on students taking classes and then partially on affiliate sales as a card maker. And I started noticing drastic drops in income from the affiliate stuff. I wasn't sure whether it was the card making industry having issues or whatnot, but it just kept getting worse over the years. And by the time the end of 2021 came, I was faced with realizing that it was actually one of my partners that had some issues on a website where I was not getting what I was due. And rather than continue that and trying to make something work that just wasn't working and wasn't workable, I decided I just had to move on. So I decided last year in 2022 that this would just be the beginning of something new and began to do more general art instead of card making. And that has led to a lot of really excellent things. Last year, I had a huge jump in my international followers, subscribers here on YouTube. It used to be like 75% in the United States and now it's only 48% in the United States and there are just people all around the world who are watching my content. So thank you all. The age range is also dropping. I used to be mostly in the folks my age. So middle age and upward and way more female. And now we've got some guys coming along. So I am super excited about reaching new audiences and new people. So I'm grateful for the subscribers who have joined in this past year especially. But as I started working through last year I had three words that I chose for my focus. I had never done that before but I saw a lot of people doing it and I said, well, what the heck? I could try it and see. And it actually helped me learn some things about myself. So I chose three words, rest, grow and play. Rest, I rocked. I got an A plus in rest last year. I wanted to rest from work because I was a workaholic and I was just doing too much. I cut back to two videos a week instead of three occasionally three last year, but usually two. And it was great. It was less pressure to produce, produce, produce. I was able to create more content for social media because that's quicker. And I took lots of walks with the dogs. I think we walked 95% of the days in 2022. So instead of me sitting at a park on a bench while they ran, I got the exercise with them when we walked every day. That was fantastic. And I also got more naps in. And naps are always good. I endorse naps 100%. They are fantastic. Then I also, you know, started looking at growth. And as an artist, I do believe I grew last year. I tried new things, new mediums and found some things that I didn't think I would excel at that I really did. Very excited to see where wood burning is gonna go because that was way, way, way, way fun in the last quarter of last year. But in terms of my business, I was hoping the business would grow as well after having had so many challenges for the last few years before that. And that didn't happen for a couple of reasons. One, of course, is inflation. A lot of people did not have the ability to invest in their art education because they were busy trying to pay for gas. And then there's also social media and social media changed some algorithms on all the platforms. And it's just really hard to get seen. It's hard to get outreach to new people as well as to be seen by those who are already following you so that you can tell them that you have a new class. And small businesses are just really struggling with that. So I had that as an issue. But one of the other things that I was hoping would compensate for all that would be that I had an app. And last January, I launched an app store and I wanted that to be a really great thing and it sucked, it was so bad. And thank you to those who gave it the good college try with me and participated in my challenge in the summer to try to get more people to use it. And it just was a terrible platform. So even though I was committed to pay for it through the end of 2022, I decided to also move over to Mighty Networks. And so I was paying for the last half of the year for two big platforms that way. And it was really brutal to the budget, but it was worth it because the art venture community on Mighty is just fantastic. If you have not been there, I highly recommend coming over and joining in. It's free to join, at least for now. I may end up eventually needing to charge a little bit to come and be a member. But nonetheless, it's a fantastic place. We had a holiday card swap last year and it was great. People were sending cards to each other for the holidays and then we had a big zoom when people revealed the card that they had received. And then the person who made it said, oh, I made that one and here's how I did it. It was just a blast. We played bingo, we had prizes, it was great. So we're hoping to do more of that kind of thing. And I'm gonna be having some people from the community join in and help out with moderating it and stuff as well in this new year. So app, the big app that I launched in January, big fail, art venture, better recovery and hopefully moving forward, that's gonna be a good thing. Then the last word for last year that was a big fail but I learned so much from it, it was the word play which you would not think would be so hard to do. Why is play so hard? Well, I ended up doing some things that for me were play. Like one of the videos I did on YouTube was painting a stick. And you know, okay, painting a stick is a little weird of a thing but hardly anybody watched it. I came away from that experience feeling really burned. Not that I was mad at anybody for not watching it but I just thought, maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. Maybe I need to go just get a job at Starbucks. I don't even drink coffee but like I kept thinking maybe I need to just go get a regular job and not do this anymore because I am apparently clueless. I don't know what to do. And I had some other things where like classes didn't take off the way that they normally used to. And I didn't bother to think, well, algorithms are blocking people from seeing some content. So maybe that's the problem. Maybe it's not me that's an idiot. Maybe it's like finding better ways to reach out to people. Maybe there's something else to do instead of just dunk on myself. But that wasn't where my head went because I ended up feeling like I couldn't play. I had to strategically think about the content for everything and is this something everybody is going to be interested in? How do I get people to pay attention? And I think if I change my word instead of being play to being delight, that's gonna be a better focus for me because if I focus on what delights me then that's gonna come through to other people. In the same way that I tell some friends who also do videos and they say, why do you always sound so good on your videos? And I said, because I sit there in front of the microphone and I paste a smile on my face, even if I'm not feeling it. And if you're smiling, that comes through even though you can't see my face, you can almost hear it in the words. You can hear it in the tone of voice, et cetera. And I think the same thing would happen with my artwork. If I delighted in what I was doing, other people would delight in it. And I think I forced too much. I was trying too hard to be pleasing instead of trying to make great projects. So this year I wanna focus on delight. I also chose the word delight because of where our society seems to be nowadays. And it's just, it's kind of weird. Everybody's on the frayed edge all the time, it seems. And maybe that's only where I live but I was at the post office on Christmas Eve and I had a couple packages to mail. And while I was walking in, there were a couple cars trying to back out at the same time. I think it was three or four cars. And nobody wanted to let anybody else go first. And they were yelling at each other out the windows of their cars. All kinds of profanity, it was bad enough. And then one of them leaned on his horn. The other two guys also leaned on their horns. And I went in because I was just waiting to see if there was gonna be a weapon coming out at any moment and they were gonna duke it out in the parking lot. I didn't know what was gonna happen. They finally did, I guess, one of them must have allowed the others to leave or something because they were gone by the time I came out. But I was struck that people were doing this on Christmas Eve. Oh my goodness, what happened to us? How did we get to where we are? It's as though we've all forgotten that sense of delight and wonder in life. We've forgotten how to be polite. We've forgotten how to have patience with people. We just don't do that. We don't show anybody any grace, any gratitude. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And if we lived in a land of delight where we were looking for the good things, we were looking for the things that made us happy and smile and even the tiniest things, then we would be willing to wait 20 seconds for somebody else to go in front of us. We would hold the door for another person. Those little things are what I think used to hold society together when we felt like we were in this world together and now we walk around with our fists up in the air ready to defend ourselves or attack someone else. But in the land of delight where we can live, we can park there, there's a lot of good to be seen. And if we live there, if we hang our hat on the hat rack when we walk in the door and we unpack our suitcase and decide we're gonna camp out in delight, then that's gonna help us to see things differently. It's gonna help us to see people differently. We're maybe no longer gonna be ready to be their victim at the drop of a hat. Maybe we can let go of resentments from 50 years ago that we're carrying around now that still make us feel like a victim to that 50-year-old injury. I don't know where every person watching this video is at. I don't know what your issues are. I know what mine are. I know I'm gonna try to let go of some of those because I wanna live in delight. I wanna become a person who passes that on to others. And I know that if when I smile while I'm doing a voiceover, while I'm telling a story, if you can hear that and that brings a smile to you, then maybe if I live a life of delight and people see that, then that also can pass on to other people. So I invite you to join me if you wanna live there because I think there's probably a lot of room. Everybody else is living in anger and resentment. So it's crowded over there. Let's move to the good place. Now, if you would like a little bit of delight in your home, I'm gonna post the painting, drawing. I don't know if you call a wash and ink thing a drawing or a painting, but I'm gonna post this piece which is called Delight in my Fine Art Shop. So if you'd like the original, you can go purchase that if that's already sold. You can go to society six and go get a print of it and hang it up in your studio, put it in your workspace. I don't know, put a little print of it in your car if you need to to remind you to live in the land of delight while you're on the highway. And maybe that'll help, just having that little reminder around. I'm gonna carry the word around in my head and try to see how that changes me in the year 2023 and let me know if it changes you. And do you have a word for the year? Have you chosen one? And if you haven't, maybe you should. What might it be? One last note before I go, I'm gonna have my big videos now on Tuesdays and Saturdays instead of Mondays and Fridays. But on Fridays, we have a card making short every week. So stay tuned for that. Subscribe if you haven't, make sure you turn on notifications because I hear only 7% of you have your notifications turned on so that you can join me here on Friday for a short and Saturday for a gouache video. And I will see you then, take care, go make something amazing. I will see you later, bye.