Seeing Red @foxteeth-blog - Tumblr Blog

I didn’t mean for him to be so pretty, but I regret nothing.

Wow! Thanks for the follow! Your art is amazing! My digital arts a bit lower in my blog. But i love thise who can actually paint digitally! I cabt paint traditionally or digital lol

foxteeth-blog

:O Thank you so much! I followed because holy smokes thems some good monsters. <3 And I fricking feel you. I have started having some fun with watercolors, but I am still hiding from oils and acrylics. I am...so intimidated.

paleo-punk

So, you said you've been living off of commissions for two or three years. Can I ask how you got started with it and how you build your online presence? I've started freelance costuming but I have no idea how to start gathering interest for my commissions. (I also think you're really cool and one day, would die to get to talk to you outside of anon since I think you're really neat and interesting)

I’d say two of the most important things are A) Advertising and B) Knowing your market. Obviously art skill/what you’re creating goes into it too, but believe it or not that isn’t as important as proper advertising and marketing. Ever seen people that aren’t all that great at art but have a huge following? I think we all have. It’s not that those people don’t deserve what they got, it’s that they are doing something you aren’t.

I’m going to just cover the face value of earning attention, rather than the process of commissioning and such itself.Post frequency - pretty much everyone I see who gains a massive following posts non freaking stop. Usually these people have something people want, be it good art, good ideas, or good personality. Even I need to get better about post frequency. And obviously, this changes person to person. For instance, people who makes costumes or cosplay or fursuits for a living might not be able to post finished products often. Because of how long it takes to complete the projects. In this case, I’d say posting frequent WIP’s and updates suffices well. Also, offer tutorials, if you’re in the middle of making something, go ahead and film it or take pictures and put it up later that night as a step by step guide. This gives your followers content, makes people want to come back to you for something, all without even finishing the project you’re working on! Knowing your market - When is tumblr/furaffinity/deviantart/twitter most active? There are lots of website that can track traffic and let you know when these times are. My tip, is don’t post in the smack dab middle of these times. Post just before, or just after. You want to catch people just when they get home from work, or just when they’re getting offline. You’ll still reach a huge market, but your work won’t get BURIED under everyone else’s posting! The longer you can stay on the front page, or high up in the search results, the better. Since people who track these things know when to post, you want to stay ahead of the game.

Knowing your market pt 2 - What’s popular right now? Hop on it. Stay on top of bandwagons. I remember when YCH’s blew up on FA. They’ve simmered down since then, but in the beginning they were hot shit and I pulled tons of money doing them. Fandoms help with this too, especially on tumblr. If you’re a fandom type person, stay in the know about your fandom and draw fanart for it if you wish to. This will get you a good following and attention because fanart gets reblogged to hell and back.Advertising (if applicable) - No seriously it works! I almost always kept an ad running on FurAffinity in the very beginning, if the site you post on offers paid advertising, do it. Even if it seems expensive. My month-long ads on FA would usually net me around 10,000 page views and, between 100-300 followers. That is amazing exposure for a website of its size. Advertising isn’t “cheating” or “selling out”, it’s a form of investment that pays off in the future.

Last but not least, offer a good product. All this work will be for nothing if you don’t have a good product to offer. Practice, study, and practice more. This goes for everything. Art, costumes, writing. In the end, you can pay for advertising and get those 10,000 hits, but if those 10,000 people aren’t interested when they browse for a few minutes, you aren’t going to earn them as a follower. If you’re doing costuming, make sure you have a good camera and set up and take appealing photos of your product. Don’t use bad lighting, ugly fonts on your advertisement/content, etc. Remember, all money you spend on your craft is an investment. Utilize it. Get the best tech, learn as much as you can.

I’m probably forgetting some stuff but this is it for now. Everyone feel free to add onto this too!

paleo-punk

Actually, I’m going to add to this. A good way to advertise on Tumblr, where advertisements aren’t really offered, is giveaways.

For instance, I give away products, overwatch game copies, battle.net cash, art, etc pretty frequently. Once again, this is either money or time that will be invested into building your following in the future. Obviously more broad things like battle.net cash is going to get more attention than say, an art giveaway. I’d start with broad giveaways then narrow down from there to your own product as you gain more following.

princewilliams1

I’m going to add to this too, because I get asked this a lot and I see these two things happening over and over and over again:

1. Do not wait until you’re “good enough”, because “good enough” will never come. As your skill improves, so too will your critical eye. You will ALWAYS find mistakes in your work because your mind’s skill will always be ~5 years ahead of your hand’s. You’re never going to be 100% satisfied and you will be constantly improving. It’s part of being an artist. So the sooner you jump in and get started, the sooner you can start building up. Being “ready” is a state of mind, not a skill level.

2. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT SHIT TALK YOUR OWN WORK. I don’t care if you think your art is hideous and you hate every piece you do. If you’re trying to be a professional artist, you should not, will not, CANNOT discredit your own work. Don’t say “this is terrible but” in the caption. Don’t point out flaws. Don’t put “hi I’m [name] and i draw shitty things” in your blog description. Don’t do it. Imagine you’re a customer and you walk into a store to buy something. You see one you’re potentially interested in, and a sales rep comes up to you…..and immediately tells you that it’s a bad product. Are you gonna buy it? No, you’re gonna put it down and walk out of the store. If you don’t think your art is worth the time or money you’re asking, why should anyone else?

(Disclaimer: this is not to say you aren’t allowed to dislike your art, or be self-conscious, or anything like that. But if you’re trying to sell your art, you need to keep that kind of thing to yourself and amongst friends, not in public where your potential clients can see it)

theearthturnsblack

My question is how do you get a decent following on tumblr? Ive had tumblr for 3 yrs and ive got 20 followers or so and only 3 actively like stuff. I feel like the tag system here just isnt as effective as Instagram (where i have 1,100 followers) ive had 2 other blogs before this one and they were even more dead no matter how much i post. Same goes with furaffinity. Ive seen some demon/monster artists take off with flying colors there but i just don’t know where to begin because i dont know any decent amount of people on here or there. I was contemplating making a strictly art blog but i feel like theres no use on here if it’s still going to be dead. Is there some technique or something? Because i know im good at my art. I get commissions here and there on instagram when my followers have the money (most are teenagers) and i pride myself in my work, even if it doesmt come out the way id planned originally. But how do people do it on tumblr and FA?

princewilliams1

Tumblr is a fickle beast. Admittedly, the overwhelming majority of my following here is from Overwatch fanart, which is a major boost, so I probably can’t answer this very thoroughly. You might be better off asking someone like @maunderfiend or @booou, who do consistent subject matter more similar to yours.

That said, it is more or less about how you tag and, as Oliver said in the OP, when you post. It’s a matter of finding active tags that apply to the image. For my monster stuff I usually use tags like “teratophilia”, “xenophilia”, “monster boy”, etc etc. Those are the tags I know a lot of the big anthology blogs (the ones who don’t post their own content but reblog a lot of others and have thousands of watchers) use to find content. Also, I’m not sure if this is still the case, but it used to be that a post would only show up in the search for its first 5 tags, so get all your important tags out of the way and add tag commentary & such to the end. And yes, fanart helps a lot, but only if you actually want to do fanart.

For FA, it’s hard to say without being super familiar with your body of work. Obviously furries and adult work do best on FA, but it is possible to be successful without those things, just much harder. Even then, it’s still a matter of tagging correctly and posting at optimal times.

From the looks of it you also only do traditional, which explains why you have a lot of traffic on Insta but not elsewhere. Insta is kind of geared toward trad artists because you can literally just take a photo of your paper and post it, while you have to find a workaround to post anything digital. Tumblr and FA are largely populated by digital artists, so getting trad work noticed can be difficult. TLDR, it’s possible, but you’ve got a lot of things stacked against you. It will happen eventually, but it might take you a bit longer than other artists.

(Also a sidenote: you don’t need an art blog, but I would recommend coming up with an art tag on the blog you have. I checked you out to try to see some of your work and it’s a bit hard to filter between the reblogs and other people’s work. Tag all your art with the same tag and put a link to it on your theme so people can see all your art in one place)

IMPORTANT: None of this is saying you should cater to furries, do adult work if you’re uncomfortable with it, or switch to digital if you don’t want to. Only use the subject matter and media you enjoy using or you will grow to resent it. I only mention these things as an explanation for why you’re having trouble now.

#to-read #advice #resources #thanks everyone I've been thinking about this a lot #I know there are a couple things I am very interested in that have big followings and active tags #That I could HAPPILY focus on drawing bunches more of without pressing myself into subject matter I don't actually like