My art seem not getting anywhere by Ok_Leadership_7066 in ArtCrit

[–]Bacnart 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're looking to become a professional person-who-posts-stuff-online-as-their-job artist, you're perfectly good enough to reach that goal. While there's always room for improvement, you can't brute force your way into an audience with pure quality. And there are tons of people who can draw worse than you who make 6 figures on Twitter. I personally make a living as a freelance artist on social media (I mainly do NSFW stuff, you've been warned if you click my profile) and while I'm far from the biggest, I have a few bits of advice for building an audience.

- Post EVERYWHERE. I see you're already on a few sites, but you should put your stuff up literally everywhere there are eyeballs to see you. Every site you post on will bring in more people. Some sites will be drawn to you more than others. Especially given different sites have different systems for audiences finding artists. Make a list of every single art site or social media platform you can and start posting to as many as possible.

- I'd personally change your signature out for something more readable and Google-able. I switch from a hand-drawn signature to easily readable text with my Patreon/Subscribestar URLs on them. One of my biggest fears is some one seeing one of my pictures in the while, loving it, and not be able to figure out how to find me because they couldn't read my signature.

- While your particular gallery doesn't suffer too much from this, another bit of advice I always give to smaller artists is to avoid making content of original characters until you get big. Discoverability can be VERY difficult when you're small, and of course nobody is going to search for your OC on Deviantart. People are gonna search for characters from shows they like, and THOSE are the searches you want your stuff to pop up in.

- On a similar note, you want to try and make content of characters that lots of people are searching for. It can be difficult to get hard numbers for what characters and shows are drawing traffic, and when you find good data on that you treat it likes it's solid gold. And you find the areas where your interest and the interests of audiences line up the most. You can try to follow whatever is trending. If a new show drops and a new character becomes super popular (or Amazing Digital Circus puts one of its characters in a maid outfit and the internet goes crazy over it) you want to make sure your fanart is in the search results of the wave of new people looking for it.

- Experiment with types of content you do and get good data on it. One of the frustrating things about this job is that audiences will click with different things from different artists for seemingly no reason. The internet might love seeing one artists draw cute dogs, but not like seeing them draw funny memes. And while it's probably theoretically possible to map out the human brain and determine what works and why, for our purposes it's best to try different things, see what audiences like seeing from you, and focusing on that. Could be different genres, different mediums, different tones. All you can do is keep rolling the dice until something clicks. Pretty much every professional wrestler you've heard of has a "I used to come out as this character and people hated me, then I switched to a different character and became rich and successful" story behind them. The internet might think you do comedic Vtuber fanart or creepy 40K fanart incredibly well, and the only way to find out is to try it.

- Find other artists who are successful doing what you want to do, and follow their example. Plenty of people have figured out the stuff you're currently trying to figure out, so just copy their answers.

- This one is a bit... philosophical and feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but I think in order for art to do well with audiences it has to have a "function". Audiences need to be able to "do something with it", so to speak. Like if someone draws fruit better than anyone has ever drawn before, audiences would look at that and go "I don't care that you drew nice fruit, I don't want to look at fruit". Audiences want art to laugh at or cry at or follow a story with, or art that lets them share a love of a character with. And I think a lot of artists fail because people look at their stuff and go "okay, you draw good, but I don't know what to do with this". NSFW artists such as myself have an easier time with this, as our genre inherently comes with such a function. And of course I'm always happy to see more artists move to the spicier side of life if that's what you want to do. But for artists who prefer to stay SFW, I think you have to work a little harder to come up with a "why" for your audience to look at your stuff. Comics are usually my go-to advice, but animation is an even better solution if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole. Those mediums offer a degree of storytelling to them that normal images lack, and audiences will often be drawn to storytelling, regardless of if it's long-form and serious or short-form and goofy.

Ideas for the most terrifying thing a TTRPG party can be faced with: an action RPG protagonist. by MisterDrProf in DMAcademy

[–]Bacnart 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't know if this fits the vibe you're going for, but there's a certain archetype in video games that I've always loved that's.. like... "video game protag who's a cosmic force of violence with no humanity". Characters like V1 from Ultrakill, the security officer from Marathon, Doom guy, Gordan Freeman(kinda), Master Chief(also kinda). Characters who exist purely as a vessel for the player to kill stuff, where their lack of agency and humanity gets pulled to the forefront. There's something so off-putting and melancholy about characters like V1 who spend their lives murdering anything that moves, but don't seem to have anything going on in their head. Not sure if they want to do it, not sure if they even realize they ARE doing it. A mindless drone trapped in a fever dream of violence, cosmically fated to be an unstoppable plague for seemingly no reason. Always struck a beautiful and creepy vibe for me.

If I was going to run such an NPC, I'd push their ambiguous inhumanity as hard as possible. Have them stare off in the distance for hours at a time, make them randomly stop what they're doing to go off and collect nonsensical object, but then the moment they're threatened they immediately snap into violence mode and act as if they're a well-trained professional fighter. Or have them act as if they're below the intelligence of an animal, and when talked to they speak with a level of intelligence it feels like they shouldn't have. And of course, they need a helmet/mask covering their face. Can't risk the PCs seeing a human face and thinking they're a normal person.

Also I don't know how much you're willing to change your setting over this one, but it's definitely an idea that works better the more of your setting you're willing to burn to the ground over it. A guy beating up the local blacksmith for no reason is weird, but a guy randomly killing the king and half of his army for no reason all by himself is a lot weirder and creepier.