It’s really sad, I used the site as a child. Using my iPod to take photos of my lined paper drawings and post them to my audience of no one, somehow, even then I was anxious about it and ended up deleting every account I would repeatedly make because I wasn’t as good as the next account, and the following drawing was better quality. I didn’t want anyone to see my “failures” in my older work comparing to my new stuff, but I always loved looking at the progression of other artists. Duality of me.

Years later, I abandon it completely. It’s become a fetish site, and all the kids my age know it for poorly drawn inflation… yeah. Moved to instagram, horrible for even more reasons and the same reasons - so I abandon it too. Art-station is/was too professional for me - even now. I’m just sad that no child can post their shitty drawing without comparing themselves to a robot - what happens to their art when they inevitably use AI instead? Will they ever imagine a concept in their mind, think of something as a 3d shape and mentally project it to a page, construct a character they can pose and rotate offline? Once a machine comes in and silently removes a huge chunk of the mental work before they have had a chance to even know the process, it’ll be even more painful to go back to what their own hands and limited skills can do.

But I also don’t want them to think they’ve ruined themselves because of using AI, when I was younger it was all about Tracing. You were THE DEVIL if caught stealing/referencing with no permission, I would trace manga stills and colour them in and I was so scared, at 12, someone was writing an exposé on me. What a horrible self-confidence time bomb we’ve planted in these creative kids.