• Shoo Rayner on YouTube

    I’m in the Guardian newspaper today, in an article about earning money on YouTube. My YouTube friends and I are amazed at how people just don’t get YouTube yet.

    The article starts off, yet again, with how Charlie Bit My Finger earned £100,000. Well that is an unverified figure that goes around. I think it’s probably a lot more.

    It’s interesting then to drop down to the second comment on the article, where Halo572 (they are always Halo, MOH or COD players!) makes a comment that he read as far as Charlie bit my Finger part and stopped reading. He then suggests how he would choose to represent himself on YouTube. Read it – enough said 😀 Now do read on…

    So many people think that Youtube is all bitten fingers, dancing babies or cute little pussy cats. Yes, there is a lot of that on there, but it’s a slowly dying fad. I’m truly grateful to all those viral kitten videos because, thanks to them, Youtube has grown into the amazing, worldwide, stable video delivery platform that it is today.

    Slowly emerging from under all the fluff, is something truly amazing – The School of the World. It’s a school for autodidacts run by autodidacts. (If you are an autodidact, you are already running to dictionary.com to find out what that means).

    You can not only choose which course you like, but you can choose the teacher you understand and get the most from too. Courses start anytime, 24 hrs a day anywhere in the world. You don’t have to book and you don’t have to pay.

    Okay, you have to be pretty special or different or have the information people want to make a living on YouTube as a teacher at the moment. Yes, those silly viral videos still make the big money, but they bring the eyeballs of the world to the medium. People watching viral nonsense might just notice a how to video thumbnail in the sure column and decide to get serious and maybe get educated a little bit by some truly amazing people.

    The Big star in my field is Mark Crilley, who teaches how to draw Manga. Crilley has been an inspiration to me – I try to do everything he doesn’t do! There is no point copying someone who is successful. You will only ever be an also ran.

    My advice is to be yourself and stay with it through thick and thin. There are a million reasons to et disheartened and give up along the way. Some will hate you (and let you know it!) but some will love you and find you and stay with you.

    It’s not easy, its extremely hard work, it’s a massive learning curve,it’s addictive and amazingly good fun.

    I’m not earning my living on YouTube at the moment, but I can see how I could. The statistics I get are very detailed. A large majority of my viewers are in leading-edge areas of the internet world, particularly California. But I also have followers as far failed as India, Latvia, Australia and the Philipines.

    When the rest of the world catches up with California, which it will, I hope I’ll be able to calm down a bit and YouTube full time, because I just love doing it 😀

    Oh yes! want to see what I do? click here for the shooraynerdrawing channel – here for Drawstuffrealeasy channel and here for the shooraynerlife channel – enjoy

  • So you got your Happy meal and you rad Mossops’s last chance and now you want to draw dear old Mossop, the sleepy, old farm cat. Watch this video and I’ll show you exactly how I draw him in the books. You may also want t see all the other Muddpuddle farm videos, so click here to watch the playlist on YouTube and make sure you are subscribed to my channel for news of my latest videos.

  • Well, Okay they have Michael Morpurgo’s name all over them but inside you will find my illustrations. These books, given away free in Happy Meals for the next month, came out about 20 years ago originally. They were ground-breaking books at the time. In those days children’s books had text down one-side and pictures on the other. These books really lifted the text off the straight line and took the story into all the corners of the page.

    These books really got me going as an illustrator and a writer too. Working so closely with Michael Morpurgo’s text taught me how stories were put together. For a long time, in my early series, I can hear Michael Morpurgo’s voice breaking through i my writing. I think I was Ricky Rocket when I finally discovered my “Voice”, urged on by my wonderful Editor, Christine Lo.

    In this video I show you the Happy meals and some of the original artwork and roughs to give you an idea of how books were put together in those days! Enjoy.