/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>4056867
I am, at least trying to, I'm only just now exiting the stage where your style is in constant flux so you feel weird showing it on sites because you feel it won't accurately represent you in like 2 weeks.

Getting 500 likes and 20 follows on a single image feels good

>>4056867
>3-7 years
wtf that's ages

>>4056867
Meh
"Play to your strengths" doesn't mean anything, if your strength is in something nobody cares about either within the market or in the public you're not gonna convince anybody. I'm sure your wonderful gouache sketches will get you hired if you can't use Photoshop. Sharing your work on online platforms is meaningless unless you want to become a celebrity and dedicate 50% of your time to marketing. In the end this is just "work hard" paternalism, yeah work hard is never bad advice isn't it. But it doesn't mean anything, everyone is working hard. Telling someone to gamble 7 years away for very likely no results is irresponsible but you wouldn't want to tell your public to quit when they can buy your tutorials instead.

>>4056890
if you do 6-10 hours a day like algenpepper did, you can cut that down to 2.5 years.

>>4056891

>I'm sure your wonderful gouache sketches will get you hired if you can't use Photoshop.

1) gouache (or whatever medium) sketches and paintings can be the entirety of someone's career. I see countless artists who are making a living doing exactly that, by winning competitions or selling their original work) and who have zero interest in getting hired for anything else.

2) if someone is into making traditional work and wants to get hired by some company for illustration/concept art/whatever, chances are they know how to paint digitally too.

>Sharing your work on online platforms is meaningless unless you want to become a celebrity and dedicate 50% of your time to marketing.

If you're not willing to dedicate 50% of your time to marketing yourself, you ain't gonna make it. Running a small business/being self employed, which is what being an artist is, requires you to constantly be doing that. At least until you get the ball rolling, at which point your followers and word of mouth will do a lot of the work for you (to an extent).

It has nothing to do with wanting to become a celebrity, growing a fanbase is just a consequence of that, not necessarily the main goal.

Now, if your goal is to do art as a hobby and you're not interested in making any money from it or have people see your work then sure, don't post your shit anywhere.

But if you want to make a living doing art, be it by doing concept art, comics, plein air painting, you name it, then posting online is almost a necessity at this point, and is certainly one of the best options for someone who doesn't know where to start.

>>4056929
But what does promoting yourself mean? It's not just saying hey I've got a product and posting your art online. You have to sell out, "network" with people which is a depressing waste of time, getting ignored by other artists because you have no followers, so to make followers you have to sell out, draw shit you don't want to draw, change your style, change your work, not "get better" but change it from the ground up into something else that happens to work with people, you have to adapt your work to how it displays on social media so people are interested in it when they apathetically scroll. You have to adopt whatever personality fits your audience, maybe you don't want to post memes and other retarded shit but if your public is young you just have to display that funny personality. Or you have to post faux deep nonsense, you have to be a showperson. It's retarded. At this point you're not even making art anymore.
>gouache (or whatever medium) sketches and paintings can be the entirety of someone's career
Yes but I wasn't talking about mediums, I was talking about skills. A more fitting example is being a concept artist who works traditionally, you're not going to beat a guy who photobashes and integrates 3D in his work, or knows how to set things up for a guy who works with 3D. What I am saying is that you have to be part of a pipeline and there are specific skills for that, you can't "play by your strengths", on the opposite you have to adapt and conform to what is requested of you. And this is very specific usually, I don't see people "playing by their strengths" unless their strengths match the market.
I blamed everything on skill but as I got better nothing changed.

>>4056894
Algen got good fast cause he was tutored by Jana Schirmer. Nobody gets good fast by themselves.

>>4056867
I'm doing the first bit, I just don't think my art is good enough to be posting online yet.

>>4056959
All the "/beg/ to pro in 2 years" conceptart.org guys we're really pushed hard by their community, which kind of sucks because that site isn't nearly as active as it was a decade ago.

Still the OP mentions getting in touch with the pros and having them judge your work, which is no doubt much better advice than you'll be getting from anonymous beginners here if you're a beginner yourself. The internet is also filled to the brim with references and tutorials and artists to study from, something that wasn't nearly as big of a luxury a decade ago, and you can see high schoolers now capitalizing on that.

>>4057005
>Still the OP mentions getting in touch with the pros and having them judge your work, which is no doubt much better advice than you'll be getting from anonymous beginners here if you're a beginner yourself.
Pros who are willing to give decent critique will do so through mentorship and that sort of 1 on 1 critique is very costly, and it's rare that artists offer mentorship because it's not convenient for them when they can just do client work instead. I have found myself asking quite a few guys for mentorship to refine some aspects of my work and they all said no (before seeing my work).
Yes there are people like Stephen Silver who will chat with you for 30 minutes but you can't get anything meaningful in 30 minutes (and if you do you've probably got a lot of work to do in general). At some point pros started telling me stuff like "submit your portfolio to X, go to X con", all career advice when I struggle to break 100 followers. I don't even feel like giving anyone my portfolio anymore because I have suspects it's just a way for them to say gj keep going even if they see you're hopeless. Before then they tell you to practice or refine your anatomy, refine your rendering, they won't give you a detailed critique of what you're doing wrong because they don't have time to do this for every e-mail they receive. I messaged mostly low-profile pros, good people but no huge following, some had no presence online at all. It's hard, really hard to get anything from pros now that there's SO many artists and you can paywall basic instruction under a patreon.

>>4056867
what are 3-5 online platforms that actually get eyes on you that aren't twitter/instagram/artstation

>>4056867
>play on your strength
The best way to become NGMI
If you ever want to become good at art you need to tackle every one of your weakness as you find it out.

>>4056990
post anyways and delete stuff every few months. people won't remember everything you post online unless it's really bad or "cOntRovErSial"

>>4057027
That's really discouraging. The days of free advice are really gone. I found pic related on Artstation. Maybe it can help you. https://thementorcoalition.com/

>>4056958
maybe a more comprehensive way of saying it would be 'play to the markets that value your strengths'
this tradfag concept artist who can't do digital for some reason even though it's way easier in every way, maybe they're not gonna be doing turnarounds for the next codblops but they could do marketing art for a wide spectrum of entertainment projects; not to mention that traditional media is still pretty common in the animation industry.
>>4056958
there's promoting yourself as an artist and promoting yourself as a craftsman. an artist is sells themselves as their uniqueness, a craftsman proves that they can get the job done. also stop basing your whole view of the industry around social media.

>>4057042
>$500 for coaching
Yeah I don't have $500 to speak with artists I don't like. I don't even want to join the game industry, my thing is comics. It's just so hard, too many fish in the water.

>>4057052
Nico Marlet is a god, he would get hired if he drew on toilet paper. I'm not saying it's impossible but to get hired when swimming against the current you have to be oustanding in every possible way. Also as you said, in the animation industry they still work with 2D concepts. But they won't hire me or you for those 2D concepts, they'll hire Nico Marlet. We're not reailstically talking about open job positions just because there are one or two examples.
>a craftsman proves that they can get the job done
like the job you just posted and got 5 likes on social media? your process video that nobody watched?
>stop basing your whole view of the industry around social media
I wish I could ignore the entirety of the internet but the truth is that in this field it's almost everything. I was talking with some curators and they said that the first thing they look at when they hire a comic artist is his social media pull. It's depressing how much it counts, I wish it didn't but it does, and no matter how you try to avoid it it always rears its ugly head. Even some publishing companies look at your social media pull, but I honestly don't know because I recently dropped the whole social media / self publishing angle and I'm just starting with the idea of going at cons in Europe.

>>4056894
>>4056959
I wish I had a pro tutor and 6-10 hours every single day for 2.5 years to make it.
Was Algen a NEET? Did he not take 5-10 min breaks every hour or something?

>>4056958
>'iM So uNiqUe tHe iNdUstRY HaS nO pLaCe fOR mE'
maybe you're just not good yet.

>>4057063
>I recently dropped the whole social media / self publishing angle and I'm just starting with the idea of going at cons in Europe
This reminds me, Im going to be starting a comic soon with a friend and while obviously I'm marketing and releasing for American audiences, I want to also try my best to aggressively market to european/former soviet area countries, Japan, and South America, got any tips for that?

I know a lot of international individuals so I can probably get some hookups with translations (I know a French who already does translations every so often for a YouTuber for example), but I'm wondering what countries might be best to appeal to specifically and how I should do that.

>>4057063
Gone are the days of penciljack, digitalwebbing and satellitesoda.
To get hired you also have to know people, what a wonderful nepotism hellhole.
>>4057076
He quit uni I think, might have been going to school for that before he quit and went hard into hard instead. He wasn't helped by Jana from the start at all, nor was Miles, SamCarr and numerous other artist that came up at the same time.
>>4057077
On the flipside look at Varguy who used to post here who most definitely is good, compare the stats on tweets prior to Sparth retweeting an image.

>>4057077
I don't think I'm unique, but the market is too strict on what works and what doesn't. Even just the way social media displays images will fuck you up if your images don't work that well in that format.
I dunno anon, after all these years it gets muddy. You don't know who's lying to you, who's crabbing, how good you are, you don't know anything. All you see is that you can't get a presence so you blame yourself but then you see random stuff go through and you know it doesn't matter.

>>4057081
>I want to also try my best to aggressively market to european/former soviet area countries, Japan, and South America, got any tips for that?
No idea besides physically attending the cons. I've seen that most artists in the Eurocomics industry don't have social media. I think it still works on a I-know-a-guy basis which might have its problems but still infinitely better than gambling on a social media algorithm.

>>4057084
>what a wonderful nepotism hellhole.
I don't believe that much in nepotism, if you're good you should be able to work, but the problem is getting exposure in the first place.

>>4057076
He enrolled in school part time to get state benefits so he could spend most of his days drawing at home

>>4056958

That's not entirely true though, yes, drawing shit that will appeal to the masses *can* speed up the process, but it's far from being a requirement. I started painting/drawing 2 years ago, between then and about 3 months ago I tried a ton of styles and subjects, from fan art, to children's book illustration, to floral paintings, and on many occasions I actually tried to create work with the idea that "this might get popular". Spoiler, it never really did.

Then 3 months or so ago I decided I wanted to actually figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my art, I realized that I'd always go back to painting environments, and that I wanted to get into concept art/illustration with a focus on environment art. So I stopped trying to draw cute girls, or whatever other subjects I thought would be popular, and focused entirely on environments. As a result, my skills started to improve consistently (since I wasn't wasting time experimenting with a million styles at once), I started gaining more followers (including some popular artists I had been looking up to) got some commissions, all that good shit. There is a market for everyone out there, you don't have to change your work or your personality to fit in somewhere, believe me.

As for networking, it's super important, but I hate it as much as the next dude. The extent of my networking is posting once a day or once every other day on Instagram, Reddit, twitter, then do whatever else the rest of the day. Besides that, I occasionally reply to tweets or posts if I really have something I want to say. Even with just that, I've made a bunch of genuine connections and even some friendly acquaintances, not because I tried, they just kinda happened.

And I get your point about the whole gouache thing now, it's definitely true that you won't get far in a digital art field if you specialize in traditional work, but at that point just focus on industries that accept traditional artwork.

>>4057087
What would it take to change that opinion on nepotism and what do you define as such? Knowing someone prior? Do you factor in their skill at all? Would transitioning from Internship > Fulltime be considered nepotism or just par for the course and convenience (considering that by law most places have to advertise for the position before hiring)
Posted image is someone that went from QA (hired for position after making friends with someone at events) to Concept artist despite this being their skill level. Theres a surprising amount of people like this when you start to look around, how many would you need to sway your opinion?

>>4057087
Jesus christ, stop being a little bitch about everything. There are mediocre artists out making a good living off of there art just because they understand that their art is a product that must be marketed in order to grow and make money. Selling art professionally is a business just like any other. Im certain you just post a shitty drawing on your social media that no one knows about once every 2 months, without considering what else you can do to draw people to your work.

>>4056867
>Practice for 1-3 hours a day
Thank fucking god, I can manage to do this (I'm already doing this in fact). I thought that if you wanted to make it you had to practice for at least 5 hours a day, which I simply can't afford to do due to studies, work and personal life.
>keep it up for 3-7 years
easily done, time moves fast and I got plenty left

>>4057115
Great optimism man.

>>4057115
A lot of professional artists and illustrators who will be your competition often have part time non-art jobs and have children. You don't have to work 18 hour days to be successful.

>>4057111
>Im certain you just post a shitty drawing on your social media that no one knows about once every 2 months, without considering what else you can do to draw people to your work.
I used to post every day and made finished illustrations.
I stopped posting on social media entirely but I would post finished works daily and worked hard at promoting myself. I burned out and it was useless. I tried again years later and I burned out again. It just doesn't work. I got more response 5 years ago when I was much worse from low effort trend hopping than from any of the work I'm making now. So fuck socials.
And yes I'll give myself the luxury of whining about anonymously on a basket weaving forum because it's the only place where I feel like venting, sue me.

>>4057087
>I don't think I'm unique, but the market is too strict on what works and what doesn't. Even just the way social media displays images will fuck you up if your images don't work that well in that format.
>I dunno anon, after all these years it gets muddy. You don't know who's lying to you, who's crabbing, how good you are, you don't know anything. All you see is that you can't get a presence so you blame yourself but then you see random stuff go through and you know it doesn't matter.
that I agree with. there are actual veteran pros who have way less subs than artists with generic tumblr/instagram styles. social media is aligned to people who either follow trends very well, do NSFW, or both. i'm sure the pros don't really give a shit about there follower count but it is discouraging to see that skill and experience don't really matter anymore. it's all about who has more time to pander to the algorithms.

>>4056867
ive drawn 3-4 hours a day everyday for 8 years and I still haven't made it

>>4057127
Thanks
>>4057134
Yeah, I guess you're right. Although I don't feel anxious about comparing myself to other peers.
I just enjoy drawing and want to get better at it. The dream is to make a living from it someday.

>>4057141
>8760-11680 hours
post progress?

>>4057115
>I thought that if you wanted to make it you had to practice for at least 5 hours a day
You do, the guy in the OP is just trying to make you feel better about yourself. 5 hours a day is nothing when you think about it, you should be doing twice that if you're serious.

>>4057148

>>4057189
what the hell brian
your old work looks better than the new stuff

>>4057250
i like his new stuff, it's very stylized and renoir-inspired. first one just looks like boring beg painting

>>4057150
This
Do you really think guys like Noah want more people in an already overcrowded industry?

>>4057150
Only 10? You should be doing 14 hours a day else you'll be worse than everyone else doing 10 hours

>>4057189
Try copying from other artists more. Like a lot more. It looks like you're drawing in a vacuum.

>>4056867
because I've been cramming math and science shit which takes up 90% of my free time so I never have time to practice in the first place.

>>4057407
ngmi

>>4057136
anon, you seem like a hardworking, determined guy. Sometimes, the things we are passionate about just don't work out, and not entirely due to faults of our own either. It's foolish to beleive that we're all going to make it if we just work hard enough. It's ok to refocus your energy and passion into other fields and just keep art on the side as a hobby, and perhaps when prospects change, you can then capitalize on the opportunity. lol, how cliché was that

>>4056867
Because is a terrible advice, NGMI.

>not all of your waking hours for 2 years at very minimum

ror

>>4056867
>>play to your strengths

sleep all day, shitpost all night, all day

>>4056894
desu based on those right pics, he could use another 1.5 years of 6-10 hours

>>4057712

>>4056894
if you draw 16h/day like RApoza did you can cut that down to ~1year.

>>4057141
>>4057189
post your timetracking database

people who don't use software to track their work time don't actually know how much they draw. guessing and estimates are useless.

>>4057614
t-thanks anon

>>4057728
honestly all I see here is rendering vs. pencil sketches
not dissing the artists but it's a bit of a loaded perspective

>>4057762
the great thing about CA was you could see each person's sketchbook and literally their whole journey. might be hard to access some of the sketchbooks now since they got fucked, but you can still find a lot of stuff if you search for it.

>>4057788
This would be fully achievable on /ic/ if not for the crabs.

>not drawing 25 hours per day
do you even want to make it?

>>4057637
>>4057807
Feng became a multimillionare from art before patreon, gumroad, and all the websites people today use shill their garbage courses on. He doesn't have to give lectures, sell artbooks, or go to cons to make money and he posts on social media whenever he feels like it. Unironically, a real living Chad. Only a fool wouldn't take his advice.

>>4056867
I'm good about the practice part, but I'm deathly afraid of showing anyone anything because I'm scared of criticism and putting a lot of work into something only for it to flop. I have unrealistic expectations, both positive and negative, and it always leads to disappointment. No matter how hard I try, I can't let go of my expectations, and it makes it painful to look at my own art. I have a lot of personality problems to deal with before I even try to network and work professionally.

>>4056891
If you can make beautiful gouache paintings you can make beautiful digital paintings. Silly anon.

>>4056867
I don't know how to draw.

>>4057031
And how the fuck do people manage 3-5 platforms? It's not like you're just fire and forget your art. You have to reply, comment on other work, like, share... I only have IG and it's fucking exhausting.

>>4058305
You also can't make it like most of the people who made it in art did before the 00s. Tons of people got lucky in all the creative and tech areas by the sheer lack of numbers back then.

>>4058346
but how fast?

>>4058552
He doesn't deny this. In almost every video he mentions how the portfolio that got him hired probably wouldn't work today, but his overall advice is still the same; you can't make it without grinding the fundamentals 5-6hrs a day for at least a year before working your own design projects for the same amount of time. Even if that means staying up till 2am. Information is so easy to get now that you have to work twice as hard as the vets like him did to make it.

What will I even draw for 3 hours? Polishing my trash drawings?

>>4058663

i've been staying up til 5-6am, waking up at 10-11, all for the grind

>>4058834
studies! make more drawings, too; can't have time to polish if you're cranking out a hundred different drawings a day

>>4058834
3 hours is nothing if you're doing serious figure or perspective studies. Think of a scene and illustrate it from different angles, add people or vehicles, change the environment, etc.

>>4058834
follow this

I like Feng Zhu's advice more

>>4057250
>>4057189
lmfao i havent come on /ic/ in over a year and brian is still posting like a fucking loser

>>4056867
Because of this.

>>4063981
>only 117 likes
Is this fake?

>>4063987
no

>>4063981
>stylized
If stylized means you just stopped giving a shit about proportions then all my drawings are heavily stylized

>>4063992
>#manga #comics
underhanded

>>4063981
>>4063992
>basically all images of his wife
the most narcissistic couple ever

>>4064090
noah has a tenacious tendency to love being cucked, don't worry

>>4063981
why would you even post this

lmfao he blocked me after i commented on his ugly ass faces

>>4063987
>>4063992
>>4063995
>>4063996
>>4064120
>>4064147
Made worse by the fact that I thought the ones yesterday were bad.

>>4064159
the man's not bad at drawing, he just has really, really, really poor taste.

>>4064161

>>4064161
Prehaps, but today he surpassed himself into "how to draw manga" book lands.

>>4063981
These look like the faces I draw wtf

Noah Bradley is a fraud, he doesn't even take his own advice.

If anything the only advice he follows himself is to "play to one's strength", which he excels since he only draws landscapes.

>>4064162
>>4064159
It's really true that once you're popular you can do whatever...
I'm not mad, at least he's honest about drawing from imagination instead of lying and stealing or worse. But the luxury of learning something so important from the ground up and being able to draw kangaroos with this amount of support is something I genuinely envy. He could probably publish a "manga" with slightly better quality a couple months down the line and people would buy it, and maybe he'd publish the next issue and then the next. When you have this kind of security it's so much easier to get work done, one thing everyone forgets about making it is that all these pros yes, worked really hard, but they got paid for it since they were almost beginners. Now you have to be a complete artist before you can even hope to land a basic job.

>>4064186
>all these pros yes, worked really hard, but they got paid for it since they were almost beginners. Now you have to be a complete artist before you can even hope to land a basic job.
it kills me every time i think about this

He deleted them, kek

>>4065760
>he doesn't post and delete just to keep up wih algoritm

that's actually the best advice you see. everybody just gives vague bs like "just keep drawing"

but seriously, just draw a lot, and post your work online at least a few times a week, build a good portfolio and try to get advice from better artists, figure out where you're the strongest, and lean on that hard, cuz that is the stuff that blows up.

>>4064402
>Now you have to be a complete artist before you can even hope to land a basic job.

no you don't. I'm living in a developing asian country and you literally just need to have some common sense and the ability to copy and remix. The pay is shit, but there are TONS of jobs if you start looking into industries like mobile games, apps, etc.

>>4065818
>copy and remix
>The pay is shit
>mobile games
I'm talking about a job that isn't utterly soul-destroying

>>4065834
that do not exist. You are looking at freelancer, or contractor artists who can pick and choose. They are the supplier of their own brand of art and they are valuable. Anything else below that and you're looking at slaving away because if you're not taking it, there are thousands more willing to.
Art is not about climbing the corporate ladder getting higher positions, its about buying time so you don't starve getting better. As soon as you got there, you quit your slave job and run your own business. If you already have enough money so you can sit around drawing all day everyday, there's very few reasons for you to go work.

>>4065844
my college painting instructor walk dogs in daytime and paint at night. Pretty sure he did it until he was 30 and were good enough to land a teaching gig at his local university. So yeah, either slave yourself, or do something non-art related so you dont go insane.

>>4065844
is that you work?

>>4065849
>my college painting instructor walk dogs in daytime and paint at night.
Fuck, I wanna do this. I always said that if I want to quit art I'd work with animals.

>>4065852
no

>>4057038
he meant sell your strengths, he didn't say to never work on your weaknesses. stop intentionally misreading things.

>>4056867
Here is really the path to success
1. Be early on CA forums from the 2000s era.
2. Have connections to get job at triple A studio by said forums
3. Work there for a year or 2 to pad resume
4. Open up an art camp and shill your camp to reddit and live off the riches while freelancing
5. Tell others online to work hard lol

>>4065991
to be fair though, noah wasn't on CA forums as much as the other guys. when he dropped out of art school he went back home and got tutored by a classically trained artist along with his regular classes (makes sense considering he did end up going to a state-school.) noah can be cringey sometimes but he really did work hard to get what he has now.

b

>>4057063
>the first thing they look at when they hire a comic artist is his social mdeia
how the actual fuck is anyone working in marvel hired

>>4066086
"look guys i dropped out of art school but still got a teacher to teach me! i'm self taught!"