Just a bit o' food for thought

Ace’s Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming Popular with Your OC on DeviantArt.

Follow these steps and I can guarantee 100 or more watchers in your first week.

Delete, shred, and burn all evidence of you ever having talent or trying to make respectable art entirely on your own. Originality will never get you popularity. The only effective way to achieve popularity is to appeal to either the generic anime crowd, or a fandom.

Make your OC! Don’t make it look like a normal girl. Give your OC kawaii overdose. Big boobs, cutesy dresses, huge eyes, revealing outfits, and animal traits like white wings.

Make the best username ever. When joining dA, make sure the name is both kawaii and awesome. Try mixing 2 random words that appeal to the shmucks on dA. Wolf, dream, pink, soda, tokyo, rainbow, kissu, chan, poke, chu, desu, nya, nyan, etc. Also very effective is to mix in your OC’s name! Example: TokyoYukiDesu

Stop trying. Original styles are NOT conducive for popularity. The only way to gain followers through originality is to put in a ton of work and work is gross. For the fandom crowds, they like to see OCs in the style of the anime they like. So a One Piece OC should look like Oda drew her. This however, is hard and may take months of practice. So instead, you need to trace.

Gather up your “reference” pictures. Save to your computer any and all cool, kawaii, romantic, or generic screenshots from the anime. Draw over them with your OC taking the place of the prettiest girl in the shot. People will begin rushing in to say how beautiful she is almost immediately.

Whore yourself out. In this step you must make fanart of the OCs of other popular “artists” on dA. Don’t bother doing things for unpopular artists, and don’t even acknowledge people with original art (they won’t respect you anyway). Anyway, by drawing art for popular, yet talent-less hacks, their watchers will notice you and watch you.

Make it shiny. Who cares about lighting source and logic? Just do random cell shading however you like, and use the luminosity tool for the eyes and hair. If you’re using photoshop, all you need are the dodge and burn tools. Then be sure to look up sparkles and other lighting effects on google images, and haphazardly overlay all that shit on there to create super kawaii desu effects. Make it look like she was caught in a wind-tunnel of pink smoke and glitter.

Hold a contest! “Your OC and Mine” are probably the best idea here, since it tricks people into thinking you give a crap about them. Fans drawing for you is just like advertising your name while also making art for you.

Take the Piss and just do the most self-absorbed thing imaginable. Make a fan club for your OC or ask someone else to make it for you. When you do this, make sure you have a folder in the group for other people’s OCs called “friends” because you really want to hammer home the false idea that you care about these people.

Do this, and you’ll be popular in no time. However, we have enough bad Sue art thieves, so please dont do this. just appreciate the satire.