u/Aromatic-Win2615

I’ve been on instagram and tik tok for over a year now and I can’t grow a following, I have 53 followers on instagram, like 9 followers on Tik tok and I post daily short comics. Ive been doing this type content for over a month now I used to post bits and pieces of my other comics before I started doing daily comics, and I was hoping I would get like 10 followers, I got 3 but nobody interacts. I really enjoy making them but the silence is kinda bumming me out, like it’s just not in the cards for me to do this or its pointless and stupid for me to carry on. I used to make graphic novels but the effort didn’t translate to squat, I got some nice comments which kept me going, and some horrible ones that made me want to flat out quit. I feel great when I finish them, but then feel like worthless crap when it doesn’t get any attention, Im turning 30 this month and my brain is drowning me on a daily, I hear It’s supposed to take time but I don’t think I can spend anymore time on this if I failed all my goals, so how long did it take for you guys? is it too early to throw in the towel?

if your an artist you probably heard the phrase “improve X and take your art to the next level” or a variation of it.

I draw, so I listened I tried to get better, but that phrase, it was always rooted in the pursuit of realism, this looks wonky, not the correct vanishing points, try improving the layout and style so it looks good, use the correct colours. but good always meant close to reality with most people I talked to. I understand why, realism looks awesome when done right, Raphael, Divinci and the other ninja turtles are masters of their craft and produced the best works of art throughout history.

Yet when I was lucky enough to go to Amsterdam, I visited the Van Gogh gallery, and was awestruck by his work, it wasn’t focused with realism, it was uniqely his own, and had more fun looking at his work. but a couple of years ago (before ai images) there was a student that claimed he was overrated and decided to rework his work, providing her renditions to some famous works, she was technically skilled and did a great job, the realism was superb, yet everyone was quick to label it wrong and shallow. It was a contrasting contradiction, people say they respect, admire and prefer realism, and by all accounts she demonstrated a technically better rendition, than Van Gogh, yet people preferred his works. Maybe because of how she declared Her talent, maybe because she was disrespectful to a legacy in the art world that people were quick to dismiss her.

but it really stuck with me,

I just saw a post on anti ai, it was about vanishing points, how ai cant use the correct vanishing points, so thats how you’re supposed to get a good impression that it’s fake.

everyone in response called those images trash and worthless, photo realism, slightly wrong alignment, people lambasted those images; what does this mean for human artists? If the conversation about artworks steers towards “it needs to be technically correct to be considered good“, where does this put human artists?, cause even Van Gogh didn’t have the best use of vanishing points.

if humans are technically better than Ai, then they are going to be labelled or criticised as Ai, if they aren’t then they are labeled worse off than Ai and dismissed, all the while Ai is improving it’s capabilities, even the stylistic images are improving their realism. But if artist chase realism were competing with Ai, and it will never be good enough.

so what is the next level artists should head towards, where should we focus our energy and development?