FA+
Shop
I think I need to unwatch various accounts.
2 years ago
When I first joined, I did so because I was seeking to learn to draw, and thought to upload my stuff in case anyone liked it.
I started watching folks whose work I liked and felt I could learn from, found by looking at the images in favourites and galleries of the people who liked my uploads.
Eventually there were too many pictures and I started only reading journals.
Then the journals became all about commissions, YCHs, and angst, pets dying and raffles.
Now I scan the journals for raffles and occasionally place commissions, and what should be fun really now isn't: raffles make me feel like a junkie, sad journals make me feel guilty or contemptuous, commissions... as I've mentioned before, are stressful and nearly half fail. I've just wasted $50 on an artist who's previously done an awesome job on Pel (too humanoid, but I was delighted with the SFX, but the latest... I'm not even sure what I'm looking at).
Frankly, I'm getting far better results from AI. DALL-E 3 on Bing is... well, it's free at the moment, and - it's really hard to justify spending on commissions that so often stress me out.
I'm going to stop entering raffles. I'm going to unwatch folks offering and probably advertising raffles, to avoid the temptation. I never do YCHs so I'll unwatch those. Adult stuff is rarely worth looking at. I'm going to unwatch folks I've received bad commissions from, to avoid that stress - as I mention, I hardly ever look at images now anyway, and for the most part since I want to draw fairly realistically, so I'm best looking at photographs. For creative approaches and whatnot, YouTube tutorials and AI are probably good enough for me for now.
I may decide to give commissions one last go, at least while AI can't put gold stripes along my badger's face stripes. I've tried improving my ref sheet, front-loading it with an anti-ref, examples from different angles, demanding WIPs, to no avail.
The only thing I can think to do now is put a big 'No full prepayment, no friends+family, and no payment for bad badger pictures. WIPs ALWAYS required.' at the top. I think I'd rather have someone turn me down.
I'm not leaving, but returning to my original reasons for joining seems like a good idea.
I started watching folks whose work I liked and felt I could learn from, found by looking at the images in favourites and galleries of the people who liked my uploads.
Eventually there were too many pictures and I started only reading journals.
Then the journals became all about commissions, YCHs, and angst, pets dying and raffles.
Now I scan the journals for raffles and occasionally place commissions, and what should be fun really now isn't: raffles make me feel like a junkie, sad journals make me feel guilty or contemptuous, commissions... as I've mentioned before, are stressful and nearly half fail. I've just wasted $50 on an artist who's previously done an awesome job on Pel (too humanoid, but I was delighted with the SFX, but the latest... I'm not even sure what I'm looking at).
Frankly, I'm getting far better results from AI. DALL-E 3 on Bing is... well, it's free at the moment, and - it's really hard to justify spending on commissions that so often stress me out.
I'm going to stop entering raffles. I'm going to unwatch folks offering and probably advertising raffles, to avoid the temptation. I never do YCHs so I'll unwatch those. Adult stuff is rarely worth looking at. I'm going to unwatch folks I've received bad commissions from, to avoid that stress - as I mention, I hardly ever look at images now anyway, and for the most part since I want to draw fairly realistically, so I'm best looking at photographs. For creative approaches and whatnot, YouTube tutorials and AI are probably good enough for me for now.
I may decide to give commissions one last go, at least while AI can't put gold stripes along my badger's face stripes. I've tried improving my ref sheet, front-loading it with an anti-ref, examples from different angles, demanding WIPs, to no avail.
The only thing I can think to do now is put a big 'No full prepayment, no friends+family, and no payment for bad badger pictures. WIPs ALWAYS required.' at the top. I think I'd rather have someone turn me down.
I'm not leaving, but returning to my original reasons for joining seems like a good idea.
I'm... uh, actually not looking to thwart AI - I recognise the issues for artists, and I'm intrigued and alarmed to find out what's going to happen to my programming job if the robots take over, but right now I'm more like a labrat with electrodes in my brain, pressing the pleasure button until I starve: I've cooked a good few thousand images over the past month or so on Bing Image Creator - so much so that I had to write a system to download the images and help me categorise them! They're fascinating in the 'creativity' when you give them contradictory prompts. I should probably post a few prompts for the interested.
I'm no friend of these mass production YCHs and stuff either. - And it seems like more and more non-furs who just have good drawing skills are coming here to try and pull money out of our pockets.
It's rare but it is frustrating when it happens.
It's like exploiting a community and then getting offended that random members dare insult their professional status by daring to think they have any personal interest rather than silently sending them easy money.
The sheer number of "YCH" and "adopts" posts- with some accounts dedicated to posting what seems like dozens of variations a day- makes it feel more like a digital marketplace than a community or gallery. It starts to feel out of place to care about art when the prevailing theme is selling minor edits of bases (to whom?).
I'm not against adopts/YCH in moderation, but sometimes it can seem like being flooded by low-effort cash-grabs.
I'm happy to see non-furry artists on here - I've had some amazing pieces, and it's good to have things disrupted every now and again. Otherwise you get lots of the same old same old.
The only reason I don't do YCHs is because my characters are neither humanoid proportions nor quadruped, and it's rare they fit in the picture, rare they fit the scenario, and vanishingly rare both at the same time when I have art budget! The only one which drifts to mind is the pretty 3x3 video game grid looking piece, which... only just counts as a YCH. :)
Adopts, I find hilarious - back in the day, we just called them 'pictures'.
Bases... I've seen some jolly good colouring jobs, and colourists are/were a real specialism in the industry.
Putting together a better preemptive negotiation policy seems like prudent measure; it's good to be honest about the quality standards you are looking for in an artist.
At the end of the day, it really comes down to managing your expectations, given that you can't change the larger system. If commissioning doesn't get you appreciable results eight times out of ten, then you should only commission someone expecting to "waste" all that money most of the time. If such gambling odds are too much for your budget or your sanity, then the AI generators and personal creative efforts are a better alternative, yes.
Sorry to hear you've had such a bad luck with your commission investments! It's apparent you care about your character a great deal, and it must have been very exhausting getting those disappointing interpretations of your lovely gold-striped badger over and over.
Whenever I get a bad commission, it makes me think that I must be being *too* particular about him, that there's something wrong with how I'm asking for commissions, that it's unreasonable to demand that he looks this way, that glaring errors are 'just that artist's style', or 'what do you expect for a $50 sketch page?'.
While I should own where I've been unclear, I need to call out artistic gaslighting and plain unprofessionalism. The trick is doing it in a way that gets an apology and corrected art: the site's policy against posting criticism of an artist is perhaps well-intentioned, but kiiinda toxic, I think.
Perhaps it has something to do with the price bracket, too -- fifty dollars used to be enough to afford a full-color scene with multiple characters and a decent background, and now that amount could barely get you a doodle, unless you have shopped around extensively, and this notion that a fifty bucks picture is borderline charity work, and subsequently no looking the "gift" horse in the mouth would be polite or accepted at that rate, can be at play here.
Bespoke artwork was always a luxury, and now that's become true even for the when it is produced within a supposedly niche subculture. But who knows -- maybe you'll get to benefit from these climbing prices once you perfect your skills and amass a decent audience?
The closest I'll get to offering commissions is trades or something like DA credits. I have a programming job that makes drawing for money quite uneconomic.
Hope your job will keep your hearth warm for the foreseeable future!
It would be inspiring to see you continue to engage in creative exchanges on a purely enthusiastic basis.
I'll be continuing to watch and follow other artists' work because I require automation and inspiration in order to have hope, and the incoming pictures are helping me, but it's still up to me to do something myself with that inspiration I receive. If you're fine without consuming then I think that's just fine too.
Sucks for you when someone doesn't get your badger right, but they always look significant and pretty to me, your golden banded badger.
I'll look at others' work on here, but my watch list is... Over 4000. I've been on here a LONG time. I can easily afford to prune. I have plenty of favourites to look at too.
I only post art of Pel that works, or has some merit. There's about 50% still on my computer in the discard pile. That's why most of it looks at least fairly good.
Either way, no reason you'd ever need to look at submissions from other people if you're just here to produce art and get feedback for it. May as well reduce the noise if you don't have the bandwidth for the bad times of strangers.
And while I agree, even if an artist is chasing numbers is pointless, it's pretty harmless (except if they expect the numbers to turn into proportionate sales).
But as I say, it felt addictive, so yeah.