Gotta Get Back to It!

Yay! The big water blob monster is happy!

Let's see, anything new to discuss this week?

Upping My Social Media Game with Yuri art???

Well, last Saturday I was looking at a web service called Flick to help me find hashtags for Instagram. I tried it for a week. Flick gave me a ton of ideas for hashtags, but it didn't help.

I have been for a while now trying to figure out how to reach folks on Instagram via hashtags. I'm trying to move beyond more of the descriptive hashtags that define the work and I'm trying to find hashtags that people organically search for. Unfortunately, for me, Flick hasn't really helped.

A lot of my new posts on Instagram have low hashtag growth, but I guess a fairly decent number of folks who follow me do like my stuff, which is always nice!

I also think I tend to jump around different hashtags which might not help. Maybe my strategy should be to use the same tags over and over because then I'd rank in those tags and people who do browse them would regularly see my material.

Hmm, I'll have to give that a try.

Oh, but I did come across an interesting tag which seems to fit with my artistic interests and allows me to get some traction.

Yuri.

I drew some illustrations of characters from another long-standing story called The Mechanical Bird and tagged them with various yuri related tags, and I did see quite a bit of impressions and reactions to it. That was really nice!

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A post shared by Glennallen Mixon (@albinogrimby)

Once I saw those numbers I began to understand that there are people who certainly search for particular tags. I mean, duh, of course something like yuri probably has a lot of viewership. What I mean is, while it's nice to tag my Instagram posts with things like #digitalillustration, either those hashtags are too big or only descriptive. Like, does anyone go to Instagram and search "digital illustration" and intend to scroll through a bunch of content?

It got me thinking: should I draw more yuri related artwork then? Well, even though I thought that, I still haven't done it, because I tend to like to draw what I want. Most of my art is doodling while I'm binge watching a TV show.

But, I'm not opposed to it!

I'm lazy.

Back on Tiktok

Speaking of lazy, I got back onto Tiktok, because, you know, someone wants to ban it for "national security" purposes. While I know that Tiktok has leaked and stolen data from users devices, there's been worse.

I learned about Tiktok two years ago and joined it. At the time, Tiktok was mostly international users, and that seemed really cool to have a non-US focused social media. We would be able to see what other people in China and elsewhere would be doing and thinking. Well, after a while it became flooded with a lot of prank videos and I got turned off to Tiktok. Plus I hated the endless scrolling; watching prank videos is a waste of time. Then I recently came back to it because of the ban that's coming (as a small, dumb gesture of protest).

And you know, Tiktok's changed a bit.

I get a lot of short videos from folks who quickly try to teach something: a magic trick, exercises, art tricks, financial/investing tricks, and so on. So endlessly scrolling through videos feels different now. I still shouldn't do it, but I feel more inspired and uplifted at what I'm seeing. It makes me want to take action and better my life in small ways. So I feel there is a positive outcome to it whereas compared to Twitter, I only feel upset with nowhere to turn to vent my anger and frustration, other than screaming into the void via Twitter itself.

So, it's unfortunate that we're going to lose Tiktok.

Webflow

Another thing I learned from Tiktok is Webflow. It's an all-in-one platform to design modern web applications/sites with backend databases. Everything is visual and it seems quite powerful.

I began to poke at Webflow and understand it's capabilities for managing content and building frontend user interfaces for the web.

It definitely got me thinking about this website. This Mortal Coil has been my blog and project site for 8 years. It could use an overhaul. In fact, I'm still not happy with how the site looks. I want something more modern, but I'm unable to design it.

After playing with Webflow, I think it might be a nice tool for prototyping a new look for This Mortal Coil's site. And hell, if I could re-create TMC's website structure and base functionality using Webflow, that could be a game-changer.

It'll take more research on my part.

New artwork Artwork

Some more pinup artwork of Magical Girl Kamiko.

 

I should really get more comic panels done now. Honestly, I hit a point where I got writers block, even though I'm mostly improvising this comic on the fly.

But, recently, I came up with a resolution, so I can continue again.

Anyhow, please enjoy another sexy miniskirt version of Kamiko, because that's what I felt like drawing instead of the comic, which presumably will also have a lot of the same.

More next week...