Hey! Mind if I vent to you? So, I'm feeling really discouraged about my art again. I feel like a good chunk of the time, my art goes unnoticed when I post. So I tried DA to see if I'd get more of a response there, I signed up only recently and I guess compared to the great art I found there, I feel kind of embarrassed posting anything of mine now
ALRIGHT sorry this took 45734986 years to reply to and it’s rambly as heck but here we go.
First of all, never feel embarrassed about posting your art. If you believe you’ve done the best you can and it’s good enough to post, you have nothing to be ashamed of. There’s plenty of time to be embarrassed later when you’re a better artist and you can go back and say “no wonder no one noticed, I can’t believe I made those mistakes, once I learned the proper way it became so simple!” I do it all the time Lei!
I’m gonna say right now, in my experience, deviantArt isn’t gonna get you very far. I recently quit the site when I got a comment… here just look at this. This person literally thought my drawing was bad because I tried to make it anatomically correct. More accurately, they thought the drawing would be somehow “better” if I had stuck to the source material’s art style.
In terms of getting your art out there to a bigger audience, it’s true, the more sites the better. But at what cost? The community there, from my impressions, is made up of so many young artists and fragile feelings that you’re hardly ever going to get a word of critique on your art. In my time on the site, about five years and around 300 posts in my gallery, I can count on one hand how many times I got a “this bit looks off and here’s why” comment. Because I’m pretty sure I only ever got one of those, now that I think about it. I’d gotten “this looks bad” with no explanation. I’ve gotten, as you can see in the link I posted, “here’s what you should change” with no real justification as to why I should change it.
And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that there are young artists posting and people trying to be kind to one another about their art. But it just feels like there’s no incentive to grow, know what I mean?
But that’s just my take on the site. If you wanna stay there, know that you’re gonna have to make a real effort to promote yourself. You need to submit often, you need to submit to Groups, and you might even wanna straight-up go to people’s pages and say “hey look at my art” just to get some eyes on you.
And there’s where Tumblr has the advantage: reblogs mean your followers are doing your promoting FOR you. But that doesn’t always mean you’re gonna get notes on a post. Some drawings I’m still super proud of and spent hours, even days on, never broke even ten notes. And, well, what can ya do? Some I reposted multiple times, some I reblogged once or twice, but eventually you just gotta let it go and move on. So those drawings didn’t get notes, it doesn’t mean they weren’t good. They just didn’t reach the right people. It’s discouraging but you can’t dwell on it. Promoting yourself can be hard! Next time you just have to make a better drawing and hope that one person notices, because sometimes it only takes one or two people and suddenly you’re creeping up on 4000 notes.
Now I can only speak for myself here, but as someone who always scrolls through her entire dashboard to wherever she left off last, I can say I always do notice your art. And as someone who sees every drawing you post, I will say that I think you’ve hit a wall and just kinda settled.
What I mean is, there’s not a lot of difference between the drawings you post now and the drawings you posted a year ago. I feel like you found a style you were comfortable with and said to yourself, maybe subconsciously, “yes this suits me, this is all I need”. And I think that’s one of the worst things you can possibly do as a growing artist. ESPECIALLY where YOUR main style influence is MOSTLY from one source.
You seem to have let yourself become comfortable with an adaptation of sorts of the ‘Gravity Falls’ style. Which is fine as a starting point. Remember how I encouraged the hell out of you when you played with old-timey cartoon styles? There were two reasons for that: first, you can’t have only one major source of influence. Second, I hoped it would loosen up your style, but I’ll get to that in a second. You should have multiple sources you draw inspiration from because it’ll not only make your style unique and personal, but it’ll help you find the methods that best work for you.
For example, I always take SO LONG doing lineart on my drawings. Straight-up black outlines just doesn’t work for me anymore, if it ever did. And once something stops working for you, you gotta change it. I’ve been trying to play with purplekecleon‘s method of lining, because it’s fast, efficient, and the results are gorgeous, something I want to try and make work in my own art. That’s not to say I wanna copy their art and every way that they do things with their art, it’s just that one aspect. I wanna figure out how they do it, then make it work for me.
For another example, I find my drawings are all so stiff and static. Gosh I wish I had the sense of form and weight and motion that modmad has. Thank goodness she posts so many sketchy sketches because I can really take a look into the thought process behind the art! Maybe if I can understand how she makes her drawings flow, it’ll click one day and mine will flow too!
For a much simpler example, eyes are tough. And sharkie-19 draws the cutest eyes! I should try to draw eyes like she does, and even if I straight-up copy at first, hopefully as I draw them more my hands will settle into motions that are quick and natural for me, and it’ll become my own style for eyes.
And don’t even get me started on tanglefootcomic like that’s my long-term art style dream MAYBE SOMEDAY….
So, if I may critique your art, I think there’s a few very simple things I think you need to do:
1 - You need to break out of your current style. What you’re working with right now is cute but limiting. Find MANY artists you love, find at least one thing those artists do that you think can make your art better, and try it yourself! It might just fit you like a glove.
2 - You need to loosen up. A majority of your drawings consist of characters standing there, looking straight at the “camera”, maybe gesturing, but that’s about it. Actually I’ve noticed you never even do ¾ views, which is kinda funny because that’s what a lot of people fall into while never going near face-on views. You’re doing the opposite! That’s a bit unusual. But yeah, more poses, more sitting, more walking, more holding things, more eating stuff, whatever gets your character moving. And EXAGGERATE that movement if it’ll help you learn!
3 - You need to start practising anatomy. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but there’s just little to no proper anatomy in any of your drawings. You’ve got arms attached to ribcages, legs at different lengths, and you basically assign only one simple shape to each body part where there should be more shapes at work. For example, your cervitaur’s deer bodies are basically just one oval. They should probably be more like two circles hanging off a curved line with a soft triangle or three for the musculature. Even the most cartoony styles start with basic knowledge of anatomy. They say you can’t break the rules until you know the rules. Once you understand how bodies are made up, then you can simplify it. You can’t simplify something if you don’t even know the complexities of its full form, right?
4 - DRAW. EVERY. DAY. Anyone who has any interest in improving artistically should do this, plain and simple. I personally do this through the “don’t break the chain” challenge, a thing I was introduced to through this video. Watch it to the end. As of this post I’ve drawn at least one thing literally every single day for 103 days in a row. And guess what? I got better. A lot better. And like they say in the video, it doesn’t mean making a masterpiece every day. It’s about making it a habit. It’s about having the opportunity to try something new every day. I’m also doing an “every single Pokémon” challenge which is more of a long term thing, but it’s still an incentive to draw. Along with a lot of other series type projects I want to do, I’m just bad with time management lol.
If you’re feeling discouraged about your art, that probably means it’s time to take these steps and really start to try and improve. Every bit of advice I just gave you, I need to take myself, you bet I do. So what I think you should do, get a sketchbook, start doing a “don’t break the chain” challenge, and at least every five days try to break out of your comfort zone and draw something new. If you can do that, I think you’ll soon enough start to get noticed and feel better about your art.
It’s worth a shot anyway!
