How to Edit an Art Video

The upcoming issue of International Artist Magazine has my top tips for making art videos.

For example, here's what I suggest in the section on Editing:

❌ Don’t waste the viewer’s time.
✅ Do cut anything that doesn’t advance the story.

❌ Don’t hide your reference.
✅ Do show a short video clip of the scene you’re looking at or the photo you’re working from. To save cutting, put the subject and painting side by side in split-screen mode.

❌ Don’t use gimmicky transitions.
✅ Do use straight cuts, dissolves (to suggest time passing between similar shots), and fade-to-black (for an interruption or shift in story).

❌ Don’t leave out key steps, but at the other extreme, don’t be tedious.
✅ Do capture the key moments when you make noticeable changes. Show the steps along the way, without any large leaps. If there’s a part of the process that’s repetitive or boring, just include a representative segment of it, and then dissolve between clips of it at various stages, or speed up the playback.

❌ Don’t just show off and make it look easy.
✅ Do share your mistakes. Show how to fix them. It goes against the presenter’s instincts to switch on the camera when things screw up, but it makes for better instruction and better storytelling. As YouTube community member Travis Noble said: “Watching an expert make mistakes is the best part of an art tutorial, because you learn truly what makes the difference between an expert and beginner is not in the mistakes but how they recover from them.”

I learned a lot from the 200+ user comments from on my YouTube Community page. Thanks to all who contributed.

The article is in issue #143 (Feb/March 2022) of International Artist Magazine.