How to use ’Twitter’
A guide to ‘twitter’ as an illustrator.
This is going to be a long one, so I’m going to put a drawing prompt on the top, and it’s not even mine.
TenMinuteArtist Prompt:
Draw Your Year & Illustrated Reflection Quilt
Mike Lowrey has an excellent drawing prompt called Draw Your Year, It’s a fun way to recap your year. It’s also a nice warmup for this free Art Gym Workshop that I did with
(to be honest she did the heavy lifting in this one)It’s going to take you more than 10 minutes to do these, but if you want to stick to the timeframe go ahead and break them up!
Okay, How to use Twitter
Twitter is dead.
Long live twitter.
X by virtue of loosing a huge percentage of its liberal following due to its owner’s affiliation to a soon to be president hosts a remanent of twitter folk. I stay, for nostalgia, and just in case.
Bluesky seems to be the choice of where the most hardcore community minded twitter folk have gone to. But I wonder if people are as active on there as they used to be when they were on twitter.
Threads is nice. Intentionally fun and non political and growing. The instagram and meta connection man that people are on there and a diverse bunch of people.
And then there’s substack notes. Which doesn’t even have a stand alone app but is filled with writers and artist sharing personal and interesting stuff.
When I say ‘Twitter’, I mean all of it.
The community that was twitter has dispersed into these four platforms, so if you imagine these for platforms as a whole, you essentially get Twitter.
From connecting me to agents, editors, my agent and the kidlit art scene, to driving readers to my substack, ‘Twitter’ has been some of the highest ROI I’ve gotten from doing social media.
I’ve been getting illustration work from Twitter for 20 years.
When I decided to come back to illustration after a decade in startups, one of the things that gave me confidence was the fact that I have always gotten work from twitter, and if I just do the things I can count on the same results.
So this letter is to tell you what I mean when I recommend using twitter.
Hint, it’s not posting art whenever and hoping for the best, that is near as hell pointless, but there are a few things that you can use twitter for to help your illustration practice.
Meet and interact with the ‘right people.’
Joined community art sharing days or events.
Curated a scene
Get on the Lists
Write Threads
Twitter has been the most powerful ‘social’ tool in my practice, for my paid readers, I’m going to expand on how to use it.