I'm writing this as an alternative to leaving hate and negativity in a review on an artist's work. I find myself very frustrated with particular artists whose body of work consits predominantly or entirely of fan-based creations. There's nothing wrong with having a healthy amount of enthusiasm for other people's work, but after I see a trend of only creating fan-based work I begin to suspect that these artists do not create for the love of creating, but rather for the success that those creations bring, however they may define that.

In layman's terms, these types of artists are tryhards. A tryhard is someone who participates in an activity with the express purpose of finding the easiest path to success. It is the success that matters to them, not the love of the activity.

What already exists and is massively successful? Popular media, the stuff that you see saturating the internet and newgrounds. Mario, Undertale, One-Punch Man, Minecraft, Splatoon, etc. Then there are sub-cultures that exist mainly on newgrounds that these artists also pander too, like: Meat Boy, Castle Crashers, Bitey, Tankman and so on. All these IPs with their pre-established fanbases require only moderate effort to pull in massive numbers.

When these artists saturate our web space with pre-established content, it makes it very difficult for original content to be recognized or discovered. Everyone only has a limited amount of attention to give each and every day, and the more they funnel their attention into a single creation the less they can offer to everyone else. Other artists who are working very hard to create something new and fresh are being ranked at the same level at best as those who exclusively make fanwork. You know who you are, and shame on you.

I'm trying my best not to let this get too heavy-handed but the more I write about it the more passionate I get. With the recent Pico Day and all the self-fellating newgrounds has done I'm just a bit over it. Again, a healthy amount of homage to great works is fine but when that's all you seem to be capable of doing, then I start to call into question your integrity as an artist. This isn't helped by the fact that Newgrounds likes to promote work that is instantly recognizable and attention grabbing (could it have something to do with... money?) as well as its own culture.

I don't know why Newgrounds doesn't promote more art teachers or streamers. Works under judgement are all the way at the bottom with no way to move them up. The site doesn't sort fanart and original work, so people end up giving their attention to the fanart more. It's all very upsetting to me, but it's an important criticism to voice.

It's 2am and I can't sleep again, so I might as well put down what I'm thinking about.

I've tried to define what art is a lot of times in my life and the definition that I'm currently using is 'anything that can be iterated upon'. I've been able to think about my work very clearly with this new definition. I'm now understanding where exactly I can call something finished, instead of going overboard with it. For example I could shelf this blog for a day and come back to it, re-read it, and improve upon it, but I know that it's probably going to serve the same function as a one-pass write-up. The quality won't improve very much and will have wasted a lot of time.

Once you get what you want out of a drawing, then any more work you put into it is, honestly, wasted time. If your aim is to go for a very detailed drawing then sure, it will require several iterations. But as I come to understand what I'm looking for in every drawing I see that most don't have to be very detailed at all. There's a time and place for iterating, mostly if you're doing something professionally or for your portfolio. Otherwise you always want to be working on something different.

Sometimes (actually all the time) I shelf a project and come back to it in a few months and iterate, but I only do that because I know that I'm not good enough to do it right the first time. It's a way for me to artifically enhance the quality of my work by creating it over a long period of time. What's better to do is put it out there, crappy as it is, and if you want to come back to it later you can call it a repaint, recolor, or whatever you like.

I won't hide from how bad I am anymore.

Making art as a kid is a lot easier and more fun than it is as an adult. Art should always be enjoyable, but the more I understand about it, the more of that underlying pressure I feel to only put out the best I can offer. Right now, that's too much to ask of myself. I no longer draw for fun and I'm always expecting that my work will turn into something I can benefit from in some way. It's no longer about that joy that I had when I was younger.

When I was younger, drawing was this thing that nobody else seemed to be interested in. All the other kids around me felt so distant because I was the only one who could draw, that was until high school anyway. So there was never any competition to worry about, I could be sure that no matter what I did I would always be the best at drawing and at least I had that. Then came high school and I found out there were other creative kids, and they were making all sorts of amazing things too, and we were all being graded on our work. That was around the time I started to "obsess" over whether my work was good enough.

I had a subscription to Gameinformer magazine and loved looking at the featured art every month, and fantasized about my work being featured one day. That's actually the reason I came up with the Okami Fan Art I drew, that picture was to be mailed in to gameinformer's offices with the hope that it would win first place in their magazine. Before that picture I never, ever worried about the outcome of something I drew, but it's been a reguler problem since then. I completely stopped working on it for almost a year because I worried it was not good enough to submit. I wanted to win, that was all I cared about, and it prevented me from even contributing my work.

I'm writing this so that maybe someone can gain some wisdom from my mistakes. I recently watched a video by Satchbag on this very issue, the conundrum of wanting your work to be absolutely perfect till  it cripples your ability to be satisfied. In the video he quotes another individual who works on the principle that "Done is better than perfect". This was something I absolutely needed to hear and that I need to repeat over and over. The work you do will never be as grand as it is in your head, it will never reach that point where you will become satisfied with it.

In order to get back to improving at art, I almost need to cut myself off from it. To get away from seeing how good everybody else is and just focus on how good I am. I'm really starting to believe that drawing 100 crappy drawings is better than drawing 1 good one, because at least you're training yourself for the future. If you do 1 nice drawing... well you only learned how to draw 1 thing really well. That probably won't help you too much down the road.

To try to bring this back full circle, don't worry if you need to take a crooked path to get around the wall, if you try to keep your path straight you'll never get past it. It's better to finish with a sloppy method than to get stuck halfway through your perfect run. There's a lot of halfway finshed work on my plate and I hope to bring you all that and more in 2016.

The term "Art" covers a wide range of media, but for the purposes of this post I use it to refer to illustrations. So what can art do that other media can't? How can it be used most effectively and how does the nature of art make it unique?

Illustrations use visual elements, sure, but so do sculpture and film. This means that anything that can be illustrated can also be physically constructed or be a frame in a movie. If you put them side by side, illustrations may seem limiting when they're up against the extra dimensions of physical space or the added context offered by the motion of an animation. Where do illustrations have a leg up on these two?

They don't demand your time.

When you want to communicate something very rapidly the most efficient way isn't to build a replica or animate a cartoon. Even rough drafts using those mediums take hours to complete. As demonstrated by the classic game Pictionary, you can transfer a number of ideas into a viewer's head in a short amount of time using simple lines.

Time is a valuable asset. Artists trying to pay their bills probably won't start by animating or modeling, those things require too much time and aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. In the face of this reality, illustration is understandably the safer option, and it's why you see so much more of it than any other type of visual medium.

But don't fret! Not everything about art is the result of a system that threw creatives overboard in favor of machines that churn out content on a regular interval. Some people just enjoy illustrating! :D When you get to a certain level of proficiency at art, you can use the time saved by illustrating to employ a technique in the art world that I call "rendering". To render your work means to enhance the visual fidelity by adding details, defining forms, or expanding the lightmap. Of course, 3-D assets and animations can be rendered as well, but those require enough time alone that most professional triple-A games and movies don't look as good as a masterful illustration.

Of course there are exceptions but they are few and far between. Any type of visual media can be highly rendered with enough time, money, and soulless manpower. Projects that would take one person a lifetime to complete can be accomplished in a relatively short time using "teams" to divide the workload. The difference between a highly rendered illustration and anything else is that it only takes one person and won't reflect a number of influences from different hands working on the project. In this way, illustration can be used to represent a distilled viewpoint of one person in a reasonable timeframe.

Speaking of time, art can also be consumed quickly. To understand a movie you must watch the whole thing. To see a 3-D model you need to rotate it. To understand a picture you simply need to look at the single frame it's represented in. Since a drawing is the most basic form of art, you can take all sorts of shortcuts when creating it. Many things can be implied like motion, form, space, mood, or lighting without explicitly defining them. Vast universes can be created rapidly by only tapping into the imagination of the viewer.

So to summarize, art can communicate ideas quickly and effectively and doesn't require a large time investment which makes it ideal for solo creators who have a vision they want share... with this line of thinking, it doesn't really make any sense to spend too much time rendering if you're focusing on art as a profession. Rendering is a luxury afforded to those that are successful enough to escape the system and only holds you back if you're just starting out.

I literally just taught myself something... what do you think about all this? Did you enjoy the read? Let me know!

THE PINUP PHASE - by luckytime

What is it? How do you spot it?

Many artists go through a phase where they will primarily draw girls/women for various reasons. Some eventually make it out of the pinup phase and go on to develop in other areas. Others will continue to draw pinups, making it the main focus of their study, and only occasionally dabble in other areas. INTERSTINGLY the pinup phase is not exclusive to just males, there exist many female artists who mainly draw other females. With so many things in this world to draw, a pinup phase is easy to spot since the artist will come back to females again and again.

Take note that the drawings do not necessarily need to be provocative or sexual in nature for it to constitute a pinup phase. Simply drawing a female contributes to the overall phase an artist is in.

There are many niches that artists fill. Some artists primarily draw environments, or animals, or fat bodies (no joke), but the reason I don't classify these as phases is because they aren't prevalent in the artistic community. As I said, MANY artists go through a pinup phase, the rest are usually doing something divergent.

Why females?

Like I said there are various reasons for focusing on the female body, and some of them tie into why humans create art to begin with. Yes part of it is sexual of course. But when you think about what those artists are aiming to create, something that's pleasing to the eye, it makes perfect sense to draw females as they are almost universally considered more pleasing than males. It then follows that a pinup phase is the logical outcome of an artist who is only human... but also partly due to laziness. Let me explain.

Being human, some of our ideologies are constant across the board. One of these is that men's bodies should be ideally muscular, while females ought to be less toned and more round... which also happens to be easier to draw. It doesn't take nearly as much knowledge of anatomy to draw a pleasing female as it does for a male. Artists in the pinup phase may find difficulty switching over to males or translating what they know about females into male attributes.

Is it good? Is it bad!?

Let me clarify that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being in a pinup phase, or even staying in one. The goal of this write-up isn't to shame those I deem unworthy or some shit like that. It's just to shed some light on this subject and get people thinking more about it.

Yes, there are upsides to the pinup phase. Namely, it's FUN!

Fun is a hard word to pin down but as a general rule, anything that's fun allows you to learn the quickest. Since we're more inclined to repeat things we find fun, we get experienced in them very quickly. Experiecne leads to success and success is a reward that we seek, and so the cycle starts over. Calling this a "phase" admittedly has a negative conotation, implying that it's something to get past, but since there's no guidebook on how to live your life this immediately becomes irrelevant. In this way the pinup phase can also serve as the gateway to a new passion for art and a lifelong hobby.

I can't finish this post without warning about the dangerous side of predominantly drawing girls/women. I explained that artists in this phase may have difficulty switching over to males. This is not only because male bodies are genetically different from females, but also have been culturally idealized to be more intricate. They often require an extensive knowledge of muscular anatomy due to the expectation of being leaner. Because of this, artists in the pinup phase often get stuck drawing the same type of body over and over, or one type of face or expression. It is important to recognize when you start receiving diminishing returns and move on to new subject matter. Yes, it's true that the most fun things are the easiest to learn, but that doesn't mean that something dull can't be learned, or isn't important to learn. If you want to specialize in a niche that's fine, but keep in mind that pinups are a niche that many other artists are competing to fill as well, and you'll need to be extra-special or have another hook to stand out.

This post was not sponsored by Lazarus: Form Recovery, even though it saved my ass when I accidentally closed the tab halfway through. This thing is basically a necessity... go get it.

This post was also not sponsored by SpellCheck.net even though I used it because Newgrounds DOESN'T HAVE ITS OWN SPELLCHECKER.

Total time ~8 hours.