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POLL: Shoild I make more recolors?
5 months ago
Hello, my faithful followers. I really appreciate your enthusiastic support for my art, although I do feel bad that I have to make you wait for, on average, a month or more in between uploads, and that's without mentioning on how taxing this is on the saint-like patience of my commissioners. I often wonder if this is one of the main reasons why traffic to my galleries is so relatively small... but then I look at extremely talented artists like Jinxed-Juice, who has been around for less time and up until the beginning of this month had and even more sparse unload schedule than I do, but has amassed a bigger following that I ever have, and I can't help but wonder what the fuck I'm doing wrong.
But, back to the question at hand, my recolor of Busrtoid's Beached Blueberry Arezu did surprisingly well, especially here on Deviant Art. So, I was wondering if you'd like to see more content like that; more recolors of inflation art color corrected to blueberry inflation (or maybe even other fruits if the inspiration so strikes me), that I can make in an hour or two (yes, it takes me that long; I suck at doing everything punctually) ever week or two during the month or more it takes me to finish a single drawing.
I will, of course, ask the original artist's permission first before recoloring and reuploading their modified work, with full credit and links to their profiles, obviously.
I'm conflicted myself. To me, the argument for yes is. first and foremost, more content. hopefully generating more traffic to my galleries, pay respects to artists whose art I admire but can't always must up enough time to write an entire essay to tell them how much their art is significant to me, and, of course, more illustrations of women turned into giant blueberries.
But on the other hand, the "no" argument is every second I spend changing someone else's work is time I'm not spending creating my own, and I piss away demonstrable protractions of time as is. And while there are some exceptional recolor artists out there (shout-out to DaBigSauce), he is just that: an exception. Recolors are cheap, easy, and can devalue the work around them in over-abundance. There is a negative stigma around recolors for that reason, which could mute the appeal of my galleries in the first place.
However, since it is you who will or won't be looking at them, I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not that is more content that you'd like to see. If you want more recolors, or want me to focus solely on original work, let me know in the poll below:
https://strawpoll.com/40Zm4RPxkga
I'll leave this poll open probably until I upload my next picture, and I really hope to hear your feedback up until then.
Who knows: there might even be more polls in the near future...
But, back to the question at hand, my recolor of Busrtoid's Beached Blueberry Arezu did surprisingly well, especially here on Deviant Art. So, I was wondering if you'd like to see more content like that; more recolors of inflation art color corrected to blueberry inflation (or maybe even other fruits if the inspiration so strikes me), that I can make in an hour or two (yes, it takes me that long; I suck at doing everything punctually) ever week or two during the month or more it takes me to finish a single drawing.
I will, of course, ask the original artist's permission first before recoloring and reuploading their modified work, with full credit and links to their profiles, obviously.
I'm conflicted myself. To me, the argument for yes is. first and foremost, more content. hopefully generating more traffic to my galleries, pay respects to artists whose art I admire but can't always must up enough time to write an entire essay to tell them how much their art is significant to me, and, of course, more illustrations of women turned into giant blueberries.
But on the other hand, the "no" argument is every second I spend changing someone else's work is time I'm not spending creating my own, and I piss away demonstrable protractions of time as is. And while there are some exceptional recolor artists out there (shout-out to DaBigSauce), he is just that: an exception. Recolors are cheap, easy, and can devalue the work around them in over-abundance. There is a negative stigma around recolors for that reason, which could mute the appeal of my galleries in the first place.
However, since it is you who will or won't be looking at them, I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not that is more content that you'd like to see. If you want more recolors, or want me to focus solely on original work, let me know in the poll below:
https://strawpoll.com/40Zm4RPxkga
I'll leave this poll open probably until I upload my next picture, and I really hope to hear your feedback up until then.
Who knows: there might even be more polls in the near future...
Personally, seeing people just model the spherical shape with the chosen character and that's it feels tame or boring if you ask me. Or otherwise, just not unique and garbage.
That second thing you mentioned is tracing, which is a major sin of the art world, as it's at best lazy, and at worst, without citation or permission of the original artist, is plagiarism.
I also would not, and will never, do the execrably lazy thing of just taking a blueberry template and copy/pasting someone else's head onto it. That's some of the worst, most factory-produced, Jeb Bush low energy blueberry inflation content out there, and I started drawing as high of quality pictures as I could make them in part to be in defiance of the deluges of dross dumped onto the internet on a daily basis.
Regardless, though only ten people have voted thus far, the super-majority have voted "Yes" for more recolors, so now it's my duty to give the people what they want. I need some way of building my following on Twitter now, anyway, so getting my recolors retweeted by exponentially more popular artists than myself could be a good way to start gaining some traction. In fact, I should tag Burstoid once I get around to reposting Beached Blueberry Arezu.
If it's any consolation, it probably won't effect the my output of my traditional drawings... in that, just add a few hours onto the weeks it takes me to make them.
I've done tracing before, but that was just for personal use, or at one point, I did it simply for a Dragon Transformation spellsofmagic spell, and uh, it didn't work out simply due to lack of concentration/focus. I used to be into that between 2013 up until 2015/2016 when I abandoned it and moved on to something else. Surprisingly the abilities that I saved one of the Dragon Transformation documents saved from an actual spell that no longer exists on the website, I just so happen to email it to myself and save that spell from being lost to time. But again, for me I didn't bother with tracing as I find it does waste time on re-doing the drawing when you can easily take a frame from a movie and draw it in your own style/version, or simply do it from scratch. It may not look right, but it's a learning process (many of my own character drawings from scratch had proportions and lines not in uniform or looked right. But as I kept doing it for the past 5 years, I started to become much more detailed than before, hence why my lineart got more cleaner over the past three years or so. Shadows/lighting I don't bother with simply because that's more extra work that's not really required. Although I could see why people would prefer that to mimic real life, but it's harder to get it right, whether traditional/digital compared to just drawing/coloring your own drawing and go from there).
I can't tell you some of the artwork I've come across used to be pretty minimal or re-using the same drawing but done three to four times, or even brought back once in a while. It got to the point where people just don't bother to draw from scratch or don't have the right tools to literally draw. Heck, people don't even own printers that have a built in scanning machine as well (Oh well)...But what you've said here, I totally agree. But as for me, I think it has to do with people stealing it, or simply not being popular, despite my writing skills done well, but my artwork doesn't reflect the same high quality style my writing is (but I do try. Just that Pokemon or creatures I'm not used to drawing continues to look off or doesn't look quite right).
Mmmm, I see....That makes sense as to why polls existed, I just thought having to do re-colors would just end up replacing the old works you've made before, when people prefer the new updated versions of it (I don't know, I'm a person who likes the "Original Vs. Remake" type of person to see how much it has changed from the old ones versus the new ones)....I mean, for the Twitter/X part, all I will say is good luck with that (in a nice way of course, not said in a rude way of course).
Ahh okay, I just thought it would take up a bit of time to re-do much of the work that already exists, but that's just me.
https://www.deviantart.com/cerkap/a.....ents-832824739
Tracing can be an incredibly useful tool if you can't visually decipher the design language of something you're trying to draw. I actually did a few exercises with Arezu and Es where I would trace a picture of them and then try to redraw the same picture next to them, as a way of teaching myself how to draw the anime style. It is only something that can supplement your artistic skills, not act as a substitute for them, so if you haven't laid a foundation of the fundamentals, trying to teach yourself through tracing is going to do you little to no good.
There's one user on DA called SailorReiMars who just has one single flat color, circle tool rendition of a Violet Beauregarde base, then just pastes the head of another character cut from an official picture of them that he color-corrected to blue over it. He has hundreds of them, and none of them are any good. That's the exact kind of content I will never make; if I do, I've either been hacked, or I got hit with dementia harder and faster than Biden.
"Stealing" is taking something that you haven't earned and/or don't deserve, so getting an artist's permission to recolor their work is the opposite of stealing. It could be argued that I did so by recoloring Burstoid's picture before asking him, but he did make it publically available to download for free, and his reaction to my recolor was "YO, THIS IS AWESOME!!!" so that argument is moot.
Oh no, I am NOT going to stop drawing and shift over to solely recoloring other people's work, just use recolors as a way of having a more steady stream of content to provide in between the weeks it takes me to finish a new drawing.
Even for someone as painstakingly slow and meticulous as me, a recolor done properly only takes a few hours. If talentless hacks can crank out a dozen pictures of cam whores turned blue in a day, then even someone like me can make a decent one in a short(ish..) time.
So when I'm talking about taking an existing photo and editing/adjusting the colored photo in Serif Affinity Photo, this is what I'm using talking about. You'll also notice how I edit some of the photos and make them transparent, and then I save both the original before the blueberry skin color, and after creating a separate "HSL" layer to pull off the blueberry skin color effect (as if the character either chewed Wonka's gum piece, or was already affected from the blueberry skin color change before/after the body/blueberry inflation situation. This is what I was talking about and I hope these images should work (if not, I'll have to delete and re-do this again).
Absolutely. But again, when I try to attempt doing it without tracing, it looks a bit worse than the original drawing (but at the same time I do make slight adjustments to make it my own version of the character, but still able to easily see how it works. But when I try to re-draw it again in another comic panel, it looks slightly different in proportion, almost as if I was trying to animate it and it keeps shapeshifting, similar to A.I. morphing but without a software program doing it for me of course). Again, proportions, anatomy, lighting, shadows, and even perspective can be difficult for most people (myself included), but I still try to do it, and instead use that energy to make my stories (one sentence or a couple at a time).
Ahh yeah, that's really just "Quantity Over Quality" type of thing. It's this reason why Bludrak's drawings are always great to look forward to because he does care about the quality, while giving people or others like myself the ability to see what else he/she's thinking of drawing (and some of his drawings are fantastic and drawn in his own way. Thought closer to the original character than mine could do. I guess drawing's not my forte, but that's just me without taking any art college classes at all, and going off of an art program that I do virtually once a week).
Yeah...For me, it's one thing to use it as a reference for what the character could look like in a story, as a resource/bibliography with their person who drew it, but "Art Thieves" is a different can of worms altogether and that used to run rampant 8 to 10 years back (which is now replaced by A.I./Media Generator Art Thieves). But I guess if other people like your work and willing to go for it and find it impressive, it uh, makes it a good impact if you ask me.
Mmmm, makes sense. I just thought it would be the opposite....That's just me.
Yeah, I was just thinking that some people out there would like to see the original versus the re-color to see any differences and such. Just a sugesstion.