TO THE PLANET OF COMIC BOOKS!

I haven’t mentioned here, but I’ve been participating in Artfight 2025!!!

My main goal this month has been to draw as many Mlaatr OCs and adjacent characters as possible.

If anyone is interested, here’s my profile!

I also want to thank everyone who drew my OCs, I appreciate it a lot! I’ve gotten a few ideas on how to tweak a bit the designs for my OCs.

While I wasn’t able to draw all the OCs in my bookmarks, I was very happy to see so many cool Mlaatr Ocs! Even after 22 years, the fandom is still thriving.

Thank you everyone!

-DES!

Also I’ll drop my stats for record keeping, not bad for a 1st year?

Many websites have those complaint forms you need to fill out to submit DMCA notice. Here are some of them:

Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/dmca

DeviantArt https://help.deviantart.com/dmca

Instagram http://help.instagram.com/contact/372592039493026?helpref=faq_content

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/634636770043106?helpref=page_content

Twitter https://support.twitter.com/forms/dmca

VKontakte https://vk.com/dmca

Pinterest https://pinterest.com/about/copyright/dmca-pin/

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/copyright_complaint_form

Flickr https://ipr.yahoo.com/copyright?.lang=en-US

Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice

Usually links to those forms can be found on website’s Terms of Service pages. (search for copyright or DMCA)

I’m sorry you feel that way. But to put it into perspective I can tell you that at least part of the mod team doesn’t get over 2 notes on their own stuff either. Notes are not always directly linked to your success. It’s a result of cultivating a community - and that does in some cases require you to find common ground with a lot of people. That is unfortunately how it works. But like I said:  a bunch of people on redline don’t exactly reap notes either, and we’re doing just fine. I personally posted a huge WIP some weeks ago, one of my best pieces in the works - and it still hasn’t got any notes. But does it really matter at all?  I was learning during the process and I liked doing it. And if you want to look at it in a cynical way, what is a note exactly? someone clicking a button. We as artists need to grow beyond the thought that other’s online clicks warrant so much of our attention when we’re just trying to have fun with our hobby.  It can be hard when you’re just getting started because it seems logical that people who hoard notes are hogging your spotlight too. They’re not. Give it time, give yourself time. Learn to become a lone wolf. Love your craft and what you do - and then learn to publish it out of spite. Defy yourself to become better - there’s really no other way around it.

This is one of my most asked questions so I am going to try and offer what advice I can. It certainly did not make any sense to me years ago and I would have liked a bit of help.

To preface this entire guide will be from the perspective of an artist attracting an audience for their work that is interested in buying and supporting their art.

Understanding and reaching the audience.

These are the people you want to see your work. If you are trying to create something commercially viable you must always keep the audience in mind. What matters to you is often lost on them and it is easy to lose track of that when you are emotionally involved in your work. 

Everything I discuss from here on is centred around the audience and how they will potentially regard you and your artwork. 

1. Time does not matter to the audience. 

I see this brought up a lot. “I worked very hard for a long time on my art, someone else did not, why don’t people appreciate that.”

To be incredibly blunt, why should they? Two artists create two similar pieces of work. One took 3 days, one took 3 hours. Both are at the same technical level and a similar concept. Why should one be “worth” anything more to the audience, who only sees the end result.

Time rarely matters to the audience. An audience with no art background of any kind will find it very hard to judge how long someone spent on a piece of art (especially digital art) unless-

It’s very clear. A huge traditional painting for example, with something for scale. A linked video showing the process. 

The artist states the time taken somewhere. Again, this is only really going to matter to the audience if it surprises them or justifies their own assumptions about the work. (It looks good, but they work quickly, how do they do it!)

I know there will be exceptions. People who really appreciate art will understand and recognise the time taken to create it. You aren’t leaving your success to exceptions though. You need to work with the majority.

Taking a long time to produce a piece of work only really informs your potential audience that they are going to have to wait a while to receive the content. If the work or the concept behind it are strong enough this is not a problem. It hurts an unknown artist trying to establish themselves though for the following reasons… 

2. Your upload schedule.

People like consistency and the best way to capture any kind of audience in media is with quick regular uploads of content they are prepared for, are looking for or easily understand. I will list a few things that I feel an audience appreciates or deviates towards.

A regular upload schedule, be it daily, twice a week, even once a month. As long as it is clear. This is a great way to keep viewers coming back to you once they find your work and are happy with the content you appear to be providing. 

The time you upload matters. If you post your artwork while the world is asleep no one is going to see it. On sites like tumblr this is even worse, hours can go by and your work will be pushed further and further down the audiences dashboard.

Consistent content. It’s great to try new stuff, but unless your audience knows you for it it could possibly confuse people browsing your page or site. Artists often get categorised as “The dude that draws X, Y Z” for a reason, it’s just easier for an audience to understand.

Do not add unnecessary comments to posts. Nothing puts people off more than 2 paragraphs of text explaining the process or a personal story on why it took so long. Save that for a separate post, consider that your audience needs to share your image. Make it as easy to share as possible.

3. Your content and the concept.

Content is important. Your finished artwork can be technically beautiful, but if there is nothing there for people to understand or relate to they will have no reason to care, or they will be purely judging your work on its level of technical ability. 

That can only go so far if the content is too strange, specific or incomprehensible. Very few people are going to share a technically impressive piece of work if it disgusts confuses or upsets them in some other aspect. 

Vice versa, a strong or interesting concept can take very simple artwork a very long way. The perfect storm is to have both a fantastic concept and strong artwork working together, but you must consider how much work that will mean you have to do and how fast can you do it. Find a balance. 

What grabs an audience varies greatly. You can build up your own brand with your own ideas concepts and characters as long as there is a consistent theme. More often than not an audience will look for:

Things they recognise 

Things they can understand at a glance

Things that are relevant to them and their lives

Consider these examples, try to consider which one has the most immediate appeal to the general public:

4. Make things easy for them, some important general advice. 

Upload on as many sites as possible, and where appropriate. (No one on a website purely for webcomics is going to appreciate your oil paintings, for example).

Join forums, sign up for art sites. Get to know people and make contacts to get your work out there. Understand the audience on the sites you frequent and what content they do and don’t enjoy. This takes time, this does not happen overnight. You have to commit and find your own path here. 

The audience will not just come to you. You need to be proactive. You have to get out there and find them, but be careful, nobody likes to feel like they’re being sold something. 

Wherever you post your art, MAKE IT EASY FOR PEOPLE TO FIND AND SHARE! Tag, list and group your content. Tags allow people to find things they already like, make use of that. Give them as few reasons as possible not to share your content. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience and think about what they would and would not want to share with their friends and people that know them. 

To conclude

I hope this will give some people who are really lost a few extra ideas when it comes to creating commercially viable content. It upsets me to say this but sometimes there are ideas that, no matter how beautifully illustrated or conceptually brilliant, will just not resonate with certain groups of people.

I really truly feel like we need to talk about this, especially as someone who has grown up as an artist online.

I’ve absorbed some unhealthy mindsets over the years and have since spent a long time unlearning them, this is definitely one of the most insidious ones.

It’s SO easy to get into a mindset that unless you get x number of notes on your work like all those other creators, what you make isn’t worth anything.

But the truly nasty part about this mindset is you never reach “x number”, because it always gets bigger!

100 notes, 500 notes, 1,000 notes, 10,000 notes… as soon as you get a single post that reaches one of your milestones - you want it to get bigger.

It’s not surprising i mean there’s entire video games where the only reward is the number getting bigger, there’s a sense of validation from seeing that number grow.

But the internet is fickle, you cannot predict what will be picked up and what won’t. This is important to remember, so much of it is based on chance and not on your personal skill.

Like, there’s a constant stream of new content being put up online every second. Having someone see your post at all is honestly amazing if you think about it.

Anyway, it’s so so easy and so unbelievably unhealthy to fall into a mindset of ‘nobody reblogs my work, I can’t create anything good’. But it’s just not true!

Your value as a creator is not determined by a number on your social media page.

It’s determined by you, and what you value in your work. For your own mental health, try not to focus on the numbers.

Focus on the people - your friends, that person who likes and reblogs everything you post, the people who wait excitedly for your next creation. They’re the ones who matter, not the number at the bottom.

LET ME SMOOCH YOU