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Back on Instagram. Sort of.

Four years ago, I stepped away from Instagram.

I had spent a lot of time posting artwork, trying to build an audience, and doing all the things artists were supposedly meant to do on social media. But I wasn’t seeing any noticeable improvement in sales. The return on the time I was investing just wasn’t there, so I stopped.

I don’t regret leaving the platform.

If I regret anything, it’s that I didn’t start years earlier, back when simply posting good artwork had a better chance of building an audience organically. By the time I was putting serious effort into Instagram, the platform had changed, and during COVID it became even easier to get sucked into Stories, Reels, posting schedules, engagement tactics and endless advice about what the algorithm supposedly wanted.

For the record, despite many people speaking with great authority on the subject, nobody has ever convinced me they really know what the algorithm wants.

Had I stayed, I suspect I would have spent far too much time trying to get better at Instagram. Instead, I spent that time trying to get better at my business.

But people still ask if I’m on Instagram. People still want to DM me there. People still follow me, even though the only thing on my account for the past four years has been a post telling them I’m not using it.

So I’ve been wondering whether there’s a way to make Instagram useful again without letting it become another job.

The thing about being self-employed as an artist is that everything is an experiment. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Something you once thought was a good idea might turn out to be a waste of time, while something you abandoned years ago might be worth another look.

I’ve been self-employed for more than 25 years, and the only real constant has been adaptation. For a long time, editorial cartooning was the biggest part of my business. As the newspaper industry changed, I had to change with it. I developed my wildlife paintings into another part of the business, expanded into licensing and retail, built an email newsletter, started experimenting with YouTube, and now I’m working on a book of my bear paintings.

Some things worked. Some didn’t. That’s business.

Diversification has helped keep mine alive, but diversification doesn’t mean doing everything. It doesn’t mean I need to be on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Threads and whatever comes next, feeding them all every week. There’s a big difference between diversifying and scattering your attention everywhere.
There’s also a practical side to visibility. I’m working with a publisher on my bear book, and when it comes out, I’ll have a responsibility to help promote it. The same goes for retailers, licensors and sponsors. Those are partnerships. They’re putting money, time, shelf space or resources behind my work, and I need to help send attention their way too. Sometimes being in business means playing the game, as long as you know why you’re playing it.

One of the hardest parts of being self-employed is that you have to do almost everything yourself. I make the art, draw the cartoons, maintain the website, deal with customers and retailers, handle orders, bookkeeping, licensing, newsletters and everything else required to keep the business moving. Somewhere in there, I still need to paint.

So when somebody says I should be making more Reels, more Stories, posting at the right time, tracking trends and figuring out what the algorithm wants this week, I have to ask a pretty simple question: to what end?

I can work my ass off doing all of that and still not sell any more artwork. Being busy isn’t the same thing as making progress.

There’s still an assumption that if an artist posts their work on Instagram, sales naturally follow. I wish it were that simple. Think about your own habits. How often do you see something on Instagram, click through to a website and actually buy it? Not once or twice over several years, I mean often.

That doesn’t mean Instagram has no value. Attention and buying intent just aren’t the same thing.

Four years ago, I was trying to build an audience there. More followers, more engagement, more exposure, and hopefully more sales. I’m not interested in chasing 100,000 followers anymore. That’s a vanity metric unless those followers actually do something.

If a few hundred people discover my work, visit my website, sign up for A Wilder View or eventually buy something, that’s more useful to me than thousands of people liking a post and moving on.

I do believe repeated exposure matters. That’s why companies advertise. You see the same product, company, artist or brand often enough and eventually it becomes familiar. I’m not going to use a gambling app, but I’m certainly aware they exist.
Maybe somebody sees one of my bear paintings on Instagram today. A few weeks later, they see another. Later, they come across one of my YouTube videos or see my booth at the Banff Christmas Market or at The Calgary Expo. Eventually they visit my website, sign up for A Wilder View or buy something.

I can’t tell you how many people at live events have asked me, “Where have I seen these before?”

I have no idea, but I’m glad they saw them somewhere.

Over the past few years, I’ve put much more effort into my website and asking people to subscribe to my emails. I get far more meaningful engagement and connection from my email list than I ever did on social media. That’s why A Wilder View remains the destination.

It’s also why I won’t put my Instagram handle or YouTube channel on my marketing material. I point people to my website and invite them to subscribe.
That’s how I’m going to treat Instagram this time. Not as a place to build an audience for the sake of having an audience, but as a window into my artwork and a doorway to my website. Finish a painting, post it on Instagram, point people toward my website and A Wilder View, and get back to work.

I already have plenty of artwork to share. I don’t need to create a separate stream of content just to keep Instagram happy. And no, this doesn’t mean I’m going back to Facebook or suddenly making TikToks.

I’m still not convinced returning to Instagram is the right thing to do. In fact, going back makes me uncomfortable. I’m simply no longer convinced that staying off it forever is necessarily the right thing either.

Leaving the platform four years ago was a business decision based on what I was getting out of it at the time. Returning now is another business decision, with different goals and a much smaller investment of my time.

Maybe it brings in a few subscribers, a sale, a licensing contact or simply more people who remember my work later. Maybe it does none of those things.

I’ll plant the seed and see what happens. If it bears fruit, great. If it doesn’t, I’ll look for another crop.

Cheers,
Patrick

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And a Local To Draw Them

The Rocky Mountain Outlook, the Bow Valley’s newspaper of record, turns 25 this week, and I’m asking myself where the time went, hardly an original thought.

Shonna and I moved to Canmore a month before the Outlook’s first issue, after seven years in Banff. For reasons I won’t get into, I was ready to move on from my three years drawing editorial cartoons for the Banff Crag & Canyon. Even though this upstart paper hadn’t published its first issue yet, I was willing to give it a chance.

In hindsight, it was one of the best decisions of my life.

Carol Picard was the Outlook’s first editor and one of three partners who risked a lot to launch the paper. I have often written about my gratitude for how much her mentorship contributed to the longevity of this career I never expected or planned for.

Were it not for the Outlook, I likely wouldn’t have self-syndicated. Without syndication, I wouldn’t have been able to leave my full-time job in 2006 and become a full-time artist. And without that, I may not have created my first grizzly bear painting in 2009.

The newspaper side of my career may no longer provide a full-time income by itself, but it gave me the skills and opportunities to adapt so that I can still create art for a living. I am at my best when painting fur, feathers, and funny-looking features. And that might not have happened without Carol and the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

So when it came time to draw a cartoon for this week’s anniversary, I made it about me, without apology, because I’ve had that cartoon space on the editorial page every week for 25 years. I’m not a journalist, and never claim to be. That’s a profession with a whole different skill set than drawing smart-ass commentary every week.

But I’ve been a part of this paper since the very beginning. And I’m proud of that.

(here’s the column I wrote for this week’s issue)

1,300 cartoons later…

When I drew my first cartoon for the Outlook, I had only a few years under my belt drawing for The Crag & Canyon. Having never gone to art school, I learned on the job. Those early cartoons are hard to look at, but you have to churn out a lot of bad art before you find the good stuff.

It was another five years of cartooning on the side before I took the full-time artist plunge, a career choice I had never considered when I moved to the valley in 1994.

I’ve been a self-syndicated editorial cartoonist for most of that time, drawing five or six other cartoons each week for newspapers across Canada. As the industry changed, my art business changed with it, eventually expanding to include whimsical wildlife paintings. Those are sold in places like the Toronto and Calgary zoos, licensed on products around the world, and at venues like the Banff Christmas Market each year.

People often call them “cartoony, but real.”

Imagine that.

But through it all, there’s been the cartoon every week for the Rocky Mountain Outlook. I have never missed an issue in 25 years.

Occasionally, another newspaper has asked me to draw cartoons about its local issues, and I’ve politely declined. Just as it often takes a local to understand a cartoon about this community, it also takes a local to draw one.

From 1,300 cartoons in this paper, it’s hard to pick favourites. Cartoons I drew 20 years ago still apply today, on issues we still haven’t solved.

____

Click here to read the digital edition of this week’s Rocky Mountain Outlook.

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My Little Tree Hugger

A new painting finished this week. I now have all the planned images completed for the bear book, plus a few I didn’t expect to finish and include. Now I just need to write some more stories and put it all together in InDesign.

This painting, which I’ve called Treehugger, was originally supposed to be the cover of the book, but my publisher needed one sooner than that. I’m still happy with Crossed Paws in that prime spot, and this new piece will have a two-page spread in the book.
Regardless of which painting ended up on the cover, however, it was always going to be Berkley. I’ve painted her more than any other bear.

Having had the joy of meeting her when she was an orphaned cub in April of 2017 at Discovery Wildlife Park, both Shonna and I had several opportunities for close contact with Berkley in her early years, and it was remarkable to get to know such a joyful and gentle bear. And Serena, who raised her, has become one of our favourite people.

Though close contact is no longer allowed for anyone but the keepers at the park, my time getting to know Berkley has been one of the most profound experiences of my life.

It was only fitting that the last piece for the bear book was another painting of Berkley, from reference I took in the fall of her first year.

I often talk about the personality showing up in a piece, that unexpected moment when I’m painting little brush strokes and life just seems to appear. It’s always stirring, often a bit emotional, and more times than I can count, I’ve actually said aloud, “There you are.”

And I don’t even realize I’m going to say it until I do.

On this painting, it was visceral. One minute it was a painting of a bear, the next it was Berkley.

For all the stress, worry and grind that comes with doing this for a living, those moments can’t be bought or planned. They have to be earned. And I’m grateful every time, when the effort pays off.

I’ve painted six or seven bears in the last year, and once the book is done, I’m going to take a bear break for awhile.

They remain my favourite animal to paint, of course, and I have more usable bear reference than I could ever paint from in this lifetime, but too much of a good thing and I might forget why I love them so much. The next time I paint a bear, I want it to be because I miss it.

And I’ve got so many other animals I want to paint, especially the domestic series I’ve been planning for several years. I took the reference photos earlier this year. Now I just need to create the paintings.

Right now, however, my priority is finishing this book and preparing for the Banff Christmas Market, which will be here before I know it.

Cheers,
Patrick

 

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A Bear of a Business

I’ve been working on this sketch painting for the bear book, and since Infinite Painter on my Wacom MovinkPad 11 was already recording the process, I figured I’d keep recording once I brought the piece over to my larger drawing display.

Stopping a piece before I paint any detail feels like I ate my veggies, but didn’t get dessert.

Rather than just talk about the painting, I used the process footage as a backdrop for something I’ve been struggling with lately: the business of art, and why it feels especially difficult this year.

Here’s the video.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Finding a Bear While Finding My Way


Here’s a new painting I didn’t expect.

I keep a wide selection of seemingly random photos in a file in Dropbox that I can grab wherever I am and sketch from. Many are photos I think will be good for sketch reference, but probably not for finished pieces.

I started this one of Gruff from Discovery Wildlife Park a while ago on the Wacom MovinkPad 11, my portable digital display that I’ve been using a lot over the last year. My intention was to get it to the point where I could add it as an accent sketch in the Bear book, something to accompany a block of text, perhaps. It’s the kind of thing I like to see when I read art books, and I’ve included several in my own.

But as is often the case, I didn’t know when to call it done. Before I knew it, I had turned it into a finished piece I’m calling “Who, Me?”

I think this one earns its own full page. I’m pleased with how it turned out. Funny enough, I still have one more painting to finish for the book. But it’s well underway and I’ll share it soon enough.

Because the app I use on the portable display records the brush strokes as I work, I decided to continue recording more of the process as I finished this one.

That turned into a short video about the painting, but also about trying to figure out how I want to make these videos without letting the recording get in the way of the work.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Second Guessing Skoki’s Seat

This is a painting that I’ve been trying to get done for quite a while. Like many paintings, as soon as they’re finished, I haven’t yet got the distance to know how I feel about them.

That comes with time. Some of my favourite pieces only became so weeks or months after their completion.

For the Bear book I’m working on, I wanted to include the grayscale value study I had done earlier, but got it into my head that I should finish it. But honestly, I don’t yet know if I like the finished piece more than the sketch. It’s more detailed, of course, but I get far too invested in these paintings.

When I spend so much time in the details, the personality waxes and wanes and I no longer have a good perspective on them. It’s kind of like repeating a word over and over again to the point where it doesn’t sound right anymore.

And because you won’t find anybody more critical of my own work than me, there comes a time in a lot of paintings where I just feel it looks like garbage, there’s no saving it, and my best artwork is long behind me.

I am not fishing for compliments or extending an invitation to a pity party. This nasty distortion of perception and need to trash our own work seems to be something many artists share.

Early last week, I finally finished three separate dog portraits for a commission client, easily one of the most challenging projects I’ve ever done, which was unexpected. I’ll write about the lessons learned from those commissions in a later post.

I figured getting back to this painting of Skoki would be a nice breather and reset. But this book deadline is very close and that ticking clock is getting louder. And that siphons a lot of the enjoyment away from the work.

I had planned on recording more of it and publishing a video as well. We all consume a lot of video, rapidly scrolling through our feeds, but unless you record your own, you really don’t know the labour involved in writing, recording and editing each one. I just haven’t the time right now.

I have one more painting in progress that I want to finish for the book, and I’m going to try to record some of that, but I still have a lot of writing to do. I know what each topic is and where it goes. I just need to find the time to write it.

And though the layout is mostly done, I need to translate it into InDesign, a program I have never used. But it’s an Adobe product (insert fist-shaking and cursing here), so at least I know how they do things. I don’t think the mechanics of a book layout are that complicated, but I’m about to find out.

When I finished this painting and showed it to Shonna, she said there was a lot going on in the bottom half, meaning it might be a better painting if I eliminated some of it.

My first thought was, “But I spent HOURS on that!”

However, setting ego aside, I cropped it to a closer version, something I can do because the full painting is 40 inches tall at print resolution, and she might be right. Though I’ll include the whole painting in the book, I’m now thinking that when I do a print, I might just use this version.It highlights the face and personality, which is the hallmark of my artwork.

What do you think? If you were going to buy a print of this painting, which version would you prefer? The full body painting or the close crop? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Regardless, another piece done, one more to go, and then I’ve got all the images I need or want for the Bear book.

But with all the rest of it, still miles to go before I sleep.

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You Asked For It: The Highland Cow Tote Bag

UPDATE: PREORDER NOW CLOSED

The Highland Cow tote preorder is now closed. Thanks to everyone who ordered! Remaining bags from this production run will be reserved for the Banff Christmas Market.

It’s finally here.

After hearing the same request again and again at the Calgary Expo and Banff Christmas Market, I finally found a tote that works with my Highland Cow painting, horns and all.

For the next 7 days, the new Highland Cow Tote is available for PREORDER.

$42 CAD + GST
FREE large Highland Cow vinyl sticker with every tote ordered
Made in Canada – Canadian orders only – Shipping flat rate $18
Preorder closes SUNDAY, AUGUST 16th at noon Mountain Time

These totes are made to order in Montreal. Please allow up to 8 weeks for production before they arrive to me, with shipping expected to begin in the latter half of October.

Once the preorder closes, the remaining bags from this production run will be reserved for the Banff Christmas Market and will not be available online again this year.

PREORDER THE HIGHLAND COW HERE

I also made a short video about the story behind the bag, why the original tote size didn’t work, and how I finally solved the problem.

 

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Painting Another Bear for the Book

I’ve been working on a new painting called Skoki’s Seat. It’s one of two paintings I need to finish for the new book, along with a few more sketches I’d like to include.

There’s no time off right now. I’m writing this on Sunday, coming up on a 12-hour day. Let me tell you, YouTube editing is a lot of work, but I’m getting better at it every time. At least I hope so.

In this new video, I share some of the painting process, a little of Skoki’s backstory, and how one reference-photo session can inspire several paintings. I also talk about digital painting, my hardware and software, and some of the unexpected work involved in putting an art book together.

Here’s the video. Hope you like it.

Cheers,
Patrick

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Now Available at Alberta’s Own

I’m excited to share that a selection of my prints and stickers is now available at Alberta’s Own Marketplace in Canmore.

After more than 20 years as a full-time artist, it still means a lot when a local business chooses to support my work. Alberta’s Own has built its reputation around celebrating Alberta artists, makers, and small businesses, so I’m proud to have LaMontagne Art included alongside so many talented creators.
If you’re spending some time in Canmore, be sure to stop in and have a look around. They’re right on Main Street, which is closed to vehicle traffic during the summer months, making it a great place to wander the local shops and eateries at a comfortable pace. The views are pretty spectacular, too.

A sincere thank you to Laura and everyone at Alberta’s Own for the opportunity. I’m proud to have my work become part of the shop, and I hope you’ll enjoy everything Alberta’s Own has to offer.

Cheers,
Patrick

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A New Bear for a New Book

I’m happy to reveal this new painting of Berkley, a bear near and dear to my heart who lives at Discovery Wildlife Park in Innisfail.

I hadn’t planned on painting another bear so soon, as I have commissions I’m desperately trying to get completed, but the book needed the right cover, and the right cover needed a new bear.

After years of delays, procrastination, and perfectionism, my first book is well underway.

My publisher, Alexander, owner of Renegade Arts Entertainment here in Canmore, first started talking with me about a book ten years ago. Leaving out the details and roadblocks along the way, all of which were self-created, I finally got tired of my own B.S. excuses.

I usually see Alexander at Expo each year, as he’s always there with several of his authors, and he brought up the book again this spring. I admitted that I figured he was probably tired of hearing me say, “soon, I just have to…”

But he was his typical gracious self and told me it would happen when it happened.

So I decided it was happening now.

We went for lunch the following week and agreed on some immediate deadlines, including a full book mockup and the marketing material he’d need to begin promoting it on his side of things.

Most pressing of all, he needed a cover.

I tried several existing paintings in the mockups, but none of them seemed right. Eventually, I realized I needed to paint a new bear for the cover of my bear book.

My friend Serena at Discovery Wildlife Park helped me gather some new Berkley reference, because she’s the only bear I wanted on the cover. Fortune favoured me, and I got the shots I needed earlier last month.

As my work is all about personality and connecting with character, I had to think like a customer, and that meant a closeup of her face for the cover. The full painting, however, will appear inside the book, and I’ll have prints available before too long.

Now that this is out there, there’s no turning back.

The book will be an 8X10 softcover, around 70–80 pages. I still have a few pieces to complete, along with additional sketches I want to add. There’s also some writing and editing to do before this fall, when all of this needs to be finished.

You’ll read more about the project in the coming months, and I’m excited, and more than a little relieved, that this is finally a real thing.

Alexander knows the importance of the Calgary Expo in my world and volunteered last week that he’s planning to have advance copies available for my Expo people in April, ahead of the official book launch on May 12, 2027.

There’s still a lot of work left to do, but I’ll manage. Scary stuff, in the best possible way.

Cheers,
Patrick