Launching R O M A N A R T

Hello and welcome to the first independent study for my senior year! For this term, I wanted to finally launch my website on my Instagram and take further steps to finalize this huge project! Throughout this journey, I was able to learn and adapt to new things such as posting continuously on social media, designing, setting up my own website, and launching a giveaway. This has been something that I am super passionate and excited about ever since my junior year. If you want to, check out my more in-depth process of creating everything on my previous blog about each step I took getting here! Here is a montage of my journey and a little bit of what the behind-the-scenes of this term looked like. I hope you enjoy it!

When first going through this process of creating R O M A N A R T I wanted to carry consistency within social media. I use social media as my source of connection with viewers so I wanted to make sure that I was using it to the best of my ability. I laid out a plan for me to have posting days, how many times I post a week, and how I speak to my audience. My goal is to make a connection with my viewers and ultimately a community. I started out by ensuring that I have effective captions and posts that will allow others to get to know me and what I do. Along with this, I really wanted to network and also become involved with other artists so I decided to create a weekly artist spotlight! This consisted of either me reaching out to artists or artists reaching out to me to be featured on my story. I wanted to expose local and global artists and creators to not only present my work but to also show off other small creators and their work. I didn't want to only focus on visual artists but also small business owners and entrepreneurs, which is what I did! This was such a great experience especially when learning about other artists similar to me and a great way to expose and share my work as well. I find it super important to support small and local artists and am extremely excited to carry this out as I continue building my page.

When conducting this platform for my art I also was thinking about having consistency with a theme or style throughout my work. When observing other artists I've noticed them having a certain style or even a repetitive look within their work. I found it important to have an organized and eye-pleasing theme, especially when trying to present myself on social media. I personally, had a lot of trouble with this! I find myself to be super-diverse when creating my pieces and since my goal was to create consistency, I wanted to also create a repetitive theme so that my feed won't look so chaotic. Sometimes when I'm painting I go based solely off of my emotions and what I simply feel like creating. Since this is common for me I now try to continue a certain pattern with color, styles, etc. to the best of my ability. I, of course, am still working on this and trying to find a specific style that can truly identify me as an artist. Other times, I do have a certain meaning that I try to convey through my work, for example, the hands that I recreate. 

This carries along with how my account has changed throughout this period of time. Now that I try to continue this style and ideas through my feed, I think that it conveys a much more organized and welcoming feeling when someone is visiting my page and of course the continuous posting. Throughout, this time I've also created a much more interactive and thoughtful captioning when communicating with the viewers. I honestly believe that this was a game-changer! Many people starting interacting with my account, which led me to network, speaking with other creators, others sharing my work, and following my page. During this time I was also making it prominent to expose my work as much as possible and whenever I was able to. This fall, I connected with a cafe located in Chicago called MeLatte Cafe. I was so fortunate enough to showcase and sell my work at their shop, which was a huge leap for me and great exposure. A lot of people took an interest in my work and from there I noticed that my page boosted! 

When finally launching my shop I decided that I wanted to create a giveaway! I wanted to really amplify excitement for the launch and found it as an effective way to gain more attention on the launch. When deciding how to exactly create my first giveaway I chose to conduct a poll for the viewers to actually choose what they like the most. I included a 16 x 20 poster of one of my paintings, along with three stickers of original pieces, and two buttons of my logo and sketch. 

Looking back at this term and journey now, I can say that I am super proud! I never thought I would finally be able to complete this goal of mine. Ever since I was young, I’ve always had a passion for art! I knew that I wanted to carry this passion of mine into my future and create something larger than I could imagine. By being observant on social media, I knew that I was able to create something for myself such as a platform to showcase my work, which would also be a place for me to reach out to others and also inspire viewers at the same time. I want to be able to create a community to not only show and sell my work but to also include a diverse range of other local or global young artists. I have always had this dream and idea and it's finally coming to life. This project has led me down an intriguing path of entrepreneurship, not only in the art world to create and sell my art but to also involve myself with different mediums. My next steps are to continue growing my work into something much larger. I am so fortunate to be able to create something like this and have the materials to do so. This is only the beginning of my online art business and I hope to continue to expand my work as much as I can.