Mimi's Newsletter - Drawing Daily and Some Time In London (Patreon)

Hello beautiful flowers!

I've been in London for the first couple of weeks of this month, mostly working and making videos but also seeing some fun London sights.

I went to the V&A gallery which is always beautiful and full of interesting things, and also to the National Portrait Gallery. Dan and I saw Groundhog Day the musical together and it was such a fun show - we really enjoyed it!

I don't think I ever told you that just before I went to Sweden I challenged myself to draw and post daily on Instagram for 30 days to see if that would improve my reach and want to share the results with you.

I had been posting about once a week to my account for quite a while before I started posting daily. Most of the daily posts during the challenge were new illustrations but I also reposted some older art so that I could have a little break from drawing here and there.

Here is a breakdown of my reach in the 30 days before the challenge (green), the 30 days during the challenge (yellow), and then for three weeks after where I didn't post anything at all (pink).

It's interesting to see that even after I stopped posting I still had more reach than before and it lasted quite a while before coming back down.

And here is a breakdown of my daily followers, again for the 30 days before the challenge (green), 30 days during (yellow), and then for three weeks after (pink).

This graph is a little more dramatic with that big spike toward the end, and that's because the very final illustration that I posted got the most engagement and was pushed to a predominantly new audience who weren't following me. That push seemed to last for several days after I had stopped posting.

I did this challenge as a fun experiment and to have a good purpose for getting back into drawing daily for a little while, and I've made a full video about it that I'll share in the next week or so on YouTube.

So, is it worth posting daily if you want to improve you Instagram reach?

Well, the answer depends on what you want. I think it's worth it if:

you really want to grow your Instagram and are willing to commit a couple of hours a day to it. If you're growing a business and need an audience on social media to sell you art or services to then maybe it's worth the commitment.

you really want to practise your art everyday. Posting daily gave me a little bit of extra purpose to sit and draw because I had given myself the challenge and it was nice to prioritise that for a little while.

For me, it was a fun challenge but not something that I could keep up with everyday. I think it's the kind of thing that I'll enjoy doing every once in a while when I want to spend more time drawing just for fun, or explore some new art techniques. Other than that, it's probably not very sustainable for me to draw every single day.

In saying that though, when I first started posting on Instagram in 2020 I was posting each weekday and having the weekends off, and that was a schedule that felt a lot more sustainable to me. It was a good middle ground of having the time to practise my art a lot, posting often enough to grow my IG account reasonable quickly, but still having two days off from drawing each week to rest.

So now I'm in France to watch some of the Tour De France in person this weekend which is exciting! I'll be more active on Patreon over the next couple of weeks sharing all of the lovely benefits for this month 🥰🌷✨