Tumblr, you’re killing art.
This is a horrible website for art. This is a horrible website for artists.
The only art that ever gets attention here is fanart, or artists who already have thousands of followers.
Nothing new is ever added to the mix, nothing else ever gets out there, because you guys see art, and while you might think it’s cool, you keep on scrolling because it isn’t Undertale or Homestuck or whatever sports anime is popular right now. You only give attention to fanart, and even that is an elitist club where attention is only given to the chosen few fandoms.
Artists who create original work are getting less and less support all the time. I’m feeling it, and I’m seeing my friends get less support too. We’re losing followers. Our note count is going down.
“Do art for yourself!” People say. But that only goes so far. No matter how you slice it, getting ignored and snubbed constantly on pieces you spent precious hours on while you watch the notes on a quick fanart doodle soar into the thousands hurts. We don’t create art to place it in a dark room and never be looked at. No artist ever posts art here thinking “I hope no one looks at this and it gets no notes.”
Encouragement and praise go a long way to help artists with original ideas, but you guys don’t care about original ideas. They’re falling by the wayside. Soon there won’t be any new things to make fanart of. How many movies that have come out in recent years have been sequels or remakes? A lot more than new, original concepts, that’s for sure. When you look around in a few years and find that everything is stale, boring, and overdone, know that you have no one to blame for that but yourself.
Ideas need support. Ideas need to be shared and fostered and encouraged. Otherwise, they die off into nothing.
Reblog more than just fanart, please.
You know, it’s not even just artist that have thousands of followers.
I have 5k+ followers as of a couple months ago. My original works hardly get any notice, and a lot of the time my fanart doesn’t get noticed. People are ridiculous when it comes to reblogging people’s art. They’re ashamed of it for some reason. Like, I’ll have art that has 100 notes. two of them are reblogs, and they were MY OWN REBLOGS. TO MY OTHER TWO ART BLOGS.
People need to fucking reblog art. REBLOG THE ART PLEASE. SUPPORT ARTIST’S ORIGINAL CONTENT! PLEASE!
