I've noticed a lot of my friends and watchers saying things to this effect lately, especially in my poll results I saw there were a few of you, and I know it's certainly something I've struggled with at several points in the two and a bit years I've been drawing digitally. It might be because your art isn't getting a lot of attention, or you simply feel that you've been making insufficient progress to be pleased with yourself.
Not Popular...?
One thing that helped me with 'popularity' was submitting to a lot of groups and putting myself out there! I see a lot of people who don't have a lot of favourites, but they also don't have a lot of views either. The key to favourites is views. A lot of people probably see the big artists with their hundreds and thousands of faves and get demotivated, but they're actually in a really similar boat to you. Just think of it like this - you probably have a pretty similar views-to-favourites ratio as a lot of the big artists here! For example, you might have maybe three favourites on your work, but it's only been seen by fifteen people. A big artist might have two hundred favourites on their work, but it's been seen by about five thousand people! So, having that audience is really important, since even with the big artists, not everyone who sees it adds it to their favourites - but there's just more people that see it.
Just because you don't have as many favourites and views, it definitely doesn't make you a bad artist. In fact, you're probably quite a good artist, and there's nothing to say that in a couple of years you won't be just as great as any of them, cause once they were standing where you are! You just don't have as much exposure yet
You DO have an audience out there! I can promise you there are people out there who will LOVE your work - you just have to make sure they see it! Unfortunately, on a site as big as dA, it's simply not enough to hope that people will happen upon your art - there's just too many deviations here. You need to be active
And this is where a lot of people fall down. In my personal experience, this has definitely been true. In my first year here, I didn't even get 100 watchers. In my second year here, I got 1600. And that's because I started being active! Submitting my art to groups, posting on the forums, giving out llamas. Talk to people, make friends, get your name out there! I find that this group called
is really helpful, not because it helps you get watchers, but because you can leave comments on people's work and get talking to them! And in turn, people will see your work too.Everyone starts somewhere, so never ever give up! And one more thing - if you're trying to build a watcher-base, make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. One of my best friends once told me, if you want to get popular, make sure you do a good thing with it (not exactly what they said, but that was the gist!) - so I decided to build my community where I could help people find each other and share their awesomeness c: Use your powers for good!
Not Good Enough...?
We all have our insecurities in our art, and I know I certainly do. But if you give up, whatever you see that is wrong with your art... that's always going to be there. The only way you can move past it is to keep working at it. It might not get better the first time. Heck it might not get better the tenth time! Over the past 2.5 years I've drawn 70 digital artworks (not counting the adopts, the sketches and all the unfinished drafts!) and I've only just started to go 'huh, I kind of like how I draw fabric now'. It may take time but at some point, you'll look back at your earlier work and go, 'holy wow, I've improved so much!' Make sure you do that too, make sure you look back. Because every work you do is better in some way than your last one, and you never know, the next thing you draw might be the one that makes you go 'oh my gosh, I can't believe I drew that!' - but you'll never know until you sit down and draw it!
If you want some help, some critiques, there are plenty of groups that have a good exchange-based critique system, such as
, where you can both get and give advice on art (giving advice helps you improve too!)So yeah, that's pretty much it ^^ I just have recently seen a lot of friends and watchers feeling down about their art and I've said these things to them, so I figured I would just compile it into a journal for people to see
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