A few days ago it came to my attention that it has been over a year since I have last posted any art

Honestly, and I mean this objectively, I don’t even know if anyone here cares, but just in case I wanted to talk about it

You see, the main reason was Instagram

Aside from a couple of times when a reel of mine got me a lot of followers and consequent temporary excitement, I guess I couldn’t bare feeding that awful algorithm anymore, subconsciously focusing on what it wanted and not what I wanted to do

Probably if I had never made an Instagram art account in the first place I wouldn’t have stopped posting, or maybe I would have stopped later on or just started posting less frequently (tumblr engagement wasn’t great either because of the like-reblog ratio thing, but it did feel less oppressive)

With that being said, I’d just like you to know that although I don’t know if I will ever post any art again, I am still doing it. I have never stopped, and hopefully never will. I have also greatly improved and I am exploring tons of styles and media

What I meant to say with all this is, in the end, that art is still a big part of my life and, if you’re an online artist and you do it for fun, trust me, the moment it stops being fun and starts feeling like an obligation, a burden, a chore or whatever, you should prioritise you and your passion’s wellbeing, and nothing else, not your follower count, not your algorithm, not even those followers who regularly interact and enjoy your art (if they can see that there is a person behind all that work, they will understand).

So yeah, sorry for the long-ish post, but that’s something I wanted to get off my chest

tl;dr: if you’re an artist who posts their art for fun, never forget the fun part and prioritise your passion over your follower count

x

Weirdly Specific Artist Ask Game

Didn't see a lot of artist ask games, wanted to make a silly one.

(I wrote this while sick out of my mind last year and it's been collecting dust in my drafts, I might as well let it run free) 1. Art programs you have but don't use

2. Is it easier to draw someone facing left or right (or forward even)

3. What ideas come from when you were little

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

5. Estimate of how much of your art you post online vs. the art you keep for yourself

6. Anything that might inspire you subconsciously (i.e. this horse wasn't supposed to look like the Last Unicorn but I see it)

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in

9. What are your file name conventions

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw

11. Do you listen to anything while drawing? If so, what

12. Easiest part of body to draw

13. A creator who you admire but whose work isn't your thing

14. Any favorite motifs

15. *Where* do you draw (don't drop your ip address this just means do you doodle at a park or smth)

16. Something you are good at but don't really have fun doing

17. Do you eat/drink when drawing? if so, what

18. An estimate of how much art supplies you've broken

19. Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.)

20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy

21. Art styles nothing like your own but you like anyways

22. What physical exercises do you do before drawing, if any

23. Do you use different layer modes

24. Do your references include stock images

25. Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by

26. What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended

27. Do you warm up before getting to the good stuff? If so, what is it you draw to warm up with

28. Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines)

29. Media you love, but doesn't inspire you artistically

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

btw its always morally correct to reblog your own art or writing onto the dash. you are always right to do this. and if people get annoyed then too bad. this is not a satire post or sarcastic this is genuine. reblog your works. and every time someone complains that you reblog your own stuff too much do it again. be proud of what you create.

It's so hard to be an artist online right now, so let me offer a tiny, selfish piece of advice.

Between NFTs, AI 'art', software and social media companies seemingly doing all they can to make their user base lives really fucking hard - we've all been part of pretty depressing and extremely online, polarised discourse.

I have opinions about all of this stuff but I won't add to the space in that way as I feel it's already at a breaking point. I'm not the most qualified person to say anything anyway.

What I want to do though, is to tell you that the one way I've found to keep the existential dread away, even if just for a little bit, is to do art just for myself once in a while. Ugly, unpostable, or even too pretty and personal to be shared. I keep it to myself like a treasure. It feels like having a printed photograph or a DVD that no one sells anymore.

I know it can be seen as a luxury, especially if posting art online is your job, but the beauty of it is that it can be anything. Maybe a sketch you scrapped because the person who commissioned it didn't like it, or a post it doodle you did in 5 minutes cause you were bored. Literally anything that you can protect and call yours.

Keep it, store it in a special place, mark it with a star.

For me it's a little anchor that reminds me that no one can make something like that, it's just mine.

Maybe a little wishy washy but it helps.

Be a freaky little goblin and hoard your unposted art for your own hee-hee hoo-hoo pleasure, reveling in the knowledge that no one else knows what it looks like. Make Gollum proud.

this is really how i feel sometimes

@balaurvestic​ these are my favourite tags now

i don’t know what else to say except that AI art is no longer simply a source of creativity or a wonder of human creation. it has become actively hostile and destructive toward the very thing it pretends to uplift and celebrate. it is void of any human element, any soul or ounce of emotion or self-expression. continuing to use AI art knowing that it comes from theft and robbing artists of their livelihood is disgusting. we need your support now more than ever. stop giving these thieves your money and admiration.

We've spent the past 20-30 years enjoying a brief time where artists were able to share their art with the world for little to no cost to themselves to audiences who never would have been able to see their works before. Artistic talent and creativity have exploded thanks to the web, with people are to share techniques and tools that would have been kept behind financial and academic barriers and create audiences in entirely new ways.

And now tech bros are out to plunder that wealth of artistry we've come to enjoy through brute force statistical modelling so they can cut the artists out of the business of selling art. Why would a company bother employing rosters of artists to produce for them when they can hire a handful of people to run the models and tweak the outputs to suit their needs?

There is nothing benevolent or celebratory in this, it is purely about theft and exploitation. It's about violating the copyright of artists in order to churn out content that's Good Enough to suit the needs of capitalists. Do you think that the publishing industry will continue to pay authors for their works if they can just hand an algorithm a prompt and get a completed work in a handful of minutes or hours, and then pay someone to edit it into something coherent (if they even need to)?

This is the end result of the commodification of art. The artistry of the works do not matter, only that they can be sold and generate profit. Capitalism has always been existed in opposition to art, Capital requires steady growth of returns and regular output, art demands innovation and risky endeavours to push the boundaries. Art is of use to capital only in so far as it is able to generate direct sales and intellectual property that can then itself be turned into a commodity. The moment Capital is able to cut artistry and artists out of the equation so that it can further maximize it's profits, it will. And what's worse, the art it produces will be stale and recycled.

Brute force statistical modelling by it's very nature is recycling, it will continue reusing old ideas and old techniques in new configurations. It is an artistic ouroboros, incapable of anything but accidental innovation through sheer volume of output, that will then be re-consumed and reconstituted all over again.

This is simply disgusting. I can’t believe it’s come to this point.

This genuinely makes me want to cry.

We need to fight this. AI art is becoming nothing more than the death of creativity. It’s disgusting, but we cannot give up