Sarah Renae Clark is a creator who turns ordinary coloring books into works of art. She’s also expanded her scope, including a documentary about mixed media art and another on creativity. She’s also the creator of the Color Cube, a tool to help artists draw inspiration for new color palettes.

We talked to her about her creative journey and how her channel has changed over time.

TL;DR

• Consider quality over quantity. Early on, Sarah switched from weekly videos to publishing more in-depth content once a month. There was a minimal drop in viewership, but that was balanced by more meaningful engagement.
• Embrace failure. Sarah showcases her own learning process so viewers find her more relatable, and in turn take more creative risks themselves.
• Find a sustainable pace. It's more important to keep creating at any pace than to stick to a fast-paced schedule that will burn you out in a few months.
• Let ideas mature naturally. Sarah likes to sit on video ideas for weeks or months. If she's still excited by then, she knows it's a good idea.
• Focus on the big picture. Don't check your analytics daily—give them a holistic analysis every so often so you can take the overall temperature of your channel.

Origins

Sarah’s foray into adult coloring books started on maternity leave 9 years ago. “I was just looking for a creative outlet. I was looking for something that I could potentially turn into a business.”

Sarah was hoping her new business would help her avoid a return to corporate office life. “I didn't even own a set of pencils, but it was something creative that I could do.” She started making content on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest before creating for YouTube. “It gave me something that taught me how to run a business. And it taught me how to do marketing just through the trial and error of starting this coloring book business.”

Sarah realized she should make the jump after reviews from other YouTubers would boost her sales. It also helped her build a connection with her audience, which was good for business. 

“Our emails went from like a 20 percent open rate to a 50 percent open rate, which is unheard of in normal email marketing.”

But her success on YouTube quickly overshadowed her work on other platforms.

Flouting traditional advice

Sarah, who used to post weekly, now posts every 1–2 months. She’s using that time to make more comprehensive videos that interview experts and integrate tutorials. But it wasn’t a purely strategic decision. “I was actually really nervous,” Sarah says. “The main reason why I moved from weekly was actually just the workload.” 

“We were spending four or five days filming and then needing another four or five days to edit. It's a lot of work when it comes to art, especially when you're doing 20-hour art pieces that you then do a time lapse of.” Sarah spoke to a YouTube strategist who showed her other creators who had succeeded by slowing down their schedules. 

“We had the choice to either create filler content, or we just produce the best videos, but did it less often,” Sarah says. She chose to publish every other week.  “When we did that, our views actually went up almost straight away. Sarah decided to slow down her schedule even more to once a month.

“Instead of just doing entertainment or tutorials, or just following trends, I'm actually trying to lean a little bit more into taking a deep dive on different types of art.”

But this change in content wasn’t successful immediately. “Our views really tanked. So the start of this year, I was getting pretty nervous because we were going from 300,000 views sort of average to about 15,000. It was a huge dip. Part of that I think was that we changed the expectations massively.”

“In the first video in particular, we changed way too much, way too fast,” Sarah said. So she pivoted again. “We tried to work out how to blend a bit of our older style back in, but we've still kept up the once-a-month or once-every-month-and-a-half. And our latest video [is] a one out of 10,” Sarah said, referring to Creator Studio’s rankings of recently published videos. “It's doing really well.”

Sarah’s new, slower format is more akin to a documentary than an art tutorial. Her video on mixed media art features Sarah interviewing other artists and trying the technique herself.

“I got to make all the beginner mistakes. I got to fail like my audience might fail,” she says.

“If I can put myself out there and take a creative risk, then it kind of gives my audience permission to do that too. And I did have a lot of comments on that video from people who weren't brave enough to try that said, ‘That’s it. I'm having a go.’”

Challenges of an established creator

Sarah says her challenges as a creator have shifted massively since she’s grown her following, but one remains constant: time.

“Ever since I started this business, the biggest challenge has always been working at how to set a pace for myself that’s sustainable,” Sarah says. “[That includes] learning how to put ideas aside and not feel like I'm going to miss out.”

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“My issue is I can think of the next 50 things and I only have time to pick three. A lot of my time is spent just working on how to better manage my time, how to balance to make sure I don't hyper-fixate too much on YouTube and therefore not hang out with my children.”

Sarah’s goal is to manage her time in a way that’s sustainable long-term and not feel like she’s constantly missing out on an idea that someone might do first. She wants to set a pace that ensures she can keep creating for another 20 years, and not burn out after 3. 

Selecting ideas

Most of Sarah’s ideas don’t come from brainstorming. “The ideas that we end up pursuing are the ones that have come to me when I'm going for a walk or I'm in the shower, or I'm trying to focus on other things and end up distracted by ideas.” Given the amount of time she puts into a video, she makes sure that she’s passionate about each idea she produces.

To filter her ideas, Sarah often sits on ideas for months at a time.

“If in a month, I'm still as excited about the idea as I was when it was new, that's when I find that a lot of my ideas kind of self-filter.”

Creative philosophy

“I spent a lot of time in the past looking up storytelling, not just artists, but across YouTube and trying to figure out where my channel fits in. And it's been something that I'm still figuring out  300,000 subscribers later.”

Sarah has realized that her channel is about inspiring others, not just showing off her own artistic chops—which is why she always wants to highlight her failures, too. Sarah also talks through her emotions as she goes through a piece.

“My videos are about creativity and I want them to feel creative. And that sometimes means breaking other rules a little bit.”

“So like with the how to draw video that I recently did, it was more about the journey of me feeling confident and then lacking the confidence and then getting help and then criticizing myself again. And I tried to take people through that back and forth emotion in the video with the editing, with the timing, with the chronological order.”

On the other hand, Sarah says, “if the art I'm doing is relaxing, we try to make the video feel more relaxing. And the edit, the footage, even the camera movement, we try to sort of keep in line with that.”

Lessons for other creators

“I think one of the biggest mistakes that I see most creators make is actually looking too closely at the analytics. Once you're a really big creator, It makes more sense. And I do think analytics are very useful,” Sarah says.

“But if you're looking at your analytics every day,  it actually ends up creating an unhealthy focus.If you're looking every day, you're going to hyper-fixate on things that might not be an accurate reflection of what's really happening. And you'll lose the bigger picture.”

Her biggest piece of advice for newer creators: “Don't worry about everything being perfect,” she says, in spite of her perfectionist tendencies. “You're going to get better if you spend more time doing something. So find excuses to practice.”

Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.