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Artists Don’t Talk about Tiktok. Four Easy Ways to Convert Static Images to Short Form Video.

Andy McNally
3 min readAug 4, 2022

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An illustration of a man holding a mobile phone.

Artists Don’t talk About TikTok, well at least traditional artists and illustrators who produce static images as our final work. Video is not a medium that many of us feel comfortable doing.

Right?

Yet, TikTok was the most consumed app worldwide. Instagram was the most downloaded in Q2 of 2022.

Artists who produce static images often shy away from being on camera, especially on video. Our art is the product and the image. Video is for the influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and now TikTok.

Visual artists, like myself, want our images to stand for themselves. I don’t want to be on camera or be troubled with producing videos. Yet, there is the ever-present nudge and push from social media platforms to produce and post short-form video content. Instagram recently, unapologetically, insisted that the future of their platform and social media was short-form video and video in general.

What can we do to respond to the world that is shifting more and more towards video content? Should we quit making illustrations, paintings, and still images? After all, didn’t video kill the radio star?

Here are a few ways to adapt your static images and content into short-form videos.

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Andy McNally
Andy McNally

Written by Andy McNally

Freelance Illustrator, Writer, & Cartoonist. Writing and drawing about technology, pop culture, sketchnotes, creative tech, and making a living as a creative.

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