I participated for the first time in this years ArtFight! An art-gifting game spanning the month of July!
In short, all participants get split into two teams. You can upload your characters (with descriptions and references) and the objective is to score as many points as possible by attacking (drawing) characters of the other team (you can also draw your own teams character, a "friendly fire" attack that yields less points). There is also revenges, drawing the character of a person who attacked you first, and you can even do revenge chains, to keep track of revenges. There are not extra points for this, but afterall it's for fun!
I've really enjoyed getting out of my art comfort zone for this event. It has also given me motivation to draw more! Finding a muse has been hard, and I've been mostly drawing artworks for new songs/videos I've been making. And of course, many of my drawings consisted of the same characters, whether it'd be fanart or my own OCs, I'd mostly be drawing the same characters (I think I'm on 14 drawings for Hitsune Kumi now!)
Well this event changed that! I cooked up seven attacks! I'll put them here and on my Art Subpage! (with links to their creators)
I haven't been updating that page, and generally, I don't really post my art. I just don't have an impulse to post it, besides sharing to some close friends of mine (and some smaller servers), and there is also a few other reasons I don't really post, for example:
- AI: There are lot of bots on the internet (posting on Twitter, and somebody posting that I commissioned them, I had gotten a lot of them in my inbox and comment sections), I would assume some also scrape images posted online. Doesn't even have to be shady individuals, big companies too. Pretty sure Meta/Twitter and the big ones also scrape for the AI training, and it is something that I have a bad opinion of. It violates an artist's right and intellectual property to be fed into a machine to generate imitations. I could go on, but I'll stop here. Just saying that they will scrape absolute anything, as otherwise their businesses and AI simply wouldn't work. Meta even scraped 81 Terabytes of Annas Archive!
- No Response: You are not supposed to value your art using the likes etc. you are getting, as the algorithms may push something, and it is basically random if a post will take off. I also have seen big artists talk about this, that works they personally think are best don't get the most likes, and I've seen it myself, my most popular video is still my first one, one that I put less work into than my original songs/other works that I'm really proud of. It just blew up one day for no reason.
But still, even if I know this, I still wouldn't want to put out something I'm really proud of and nobody sees/responds to it (and it gets possible stolen). I would be disappointed. If I post something, I mostly post it into the smaller discord servers I'm in, because people are somewhat active and you recognize their names. It feels more seen that in the vastness of the online world.
Artfight was also fun, because people are really happy about receiving art of their characters, myself included. Oh, how nice it was to see that somebody crafted a masterpiece including my characters :D And it was nice seeing people be happy about what I drew for them too!
I have this feeling about my art being stolen might be a bit silly, as I don't really have a large following. People way bigger and maybe also better than I do not do that. I don't really like putting watermarks and decreasing resolution or jping my art, but I think as far as posting goes, it makes it safer. ArtFight even recommends it.
I have less reservations about YouTube, it feels more natural for me.
I guess I also feel like many plattforms are just bad for art? Looking through somebodies portfolio on Twitter is horrible, especially if they post a lot, you can't really search/filter it properly. Tumblr works nice with the tagging system, but I generally don't use it so much anymore, I have the feeling I see more interesting art on Twitter, their algorithm works better, even if looking through a singular artist sucks. Reddit actually makes sense with subreddits, that if you want OneShot or Deltarune artwork, you check the respective subreddits. I have the feeling I've been less on social media in general, just not enjoying it so much anymore/not having the time for it with my other hobbies and work. Sharing with friends works good through Discord; I like the small server concept or just DMing my close friends.