How does someone even get recognized now for their work? Like, how to legit build up a decent following or get established now? Seems like social media is so cluttered and there's so much jockeying for likes and followers that it's competitive to the point where you'd need to put in a tremendous amount of time into these platforms to try to get any kind of momentum going. Time that should be spent making work.

All of the big artists were just already established before this whole thing took off and just brought their popularity over to it. Even then most of them are now resorting to posting reels and videos since tiktok has made that the standard for views. A lot of the bigger artists can afford to just hire someone else to edit their videos while they focus on the work.

It also looks like most of the audience for art on social media is just other artists. Not going anywhere posting still frames.

Not even going to get into the AI larpers who can just spam content every day to get ahead in the algorithms.

Is there any way to still make money off of art now if you aren't already established? Even just doing lame shit like busking or drawing caricatures on the street? How to make some bucks bros? What avenues still make any sense, like trying to make comics vs concept art vs gallery art vs tattoo artist, etc. or is it time to just embrace the doomer mindset?

Is it over bros?

Is this the hourly demotivational thread? kys

By making something exceptional and putting it where people can see it. You can stop making these threads now.

>>7650364
>>7650360
i guess you two are just so good that you beat the algorithm and are now making a comfy living off of your art
or maybe some pajeet that can scrape by on $27 USD a month from fiverr

>>7650356 (OP)
There are a million ways to make it. Most new people coming up make in a new, unique way that only they could do. You need to get lucky, but you only get the opportunity to get lucky if you actually make stuff and put it out there.

>>7650372
name one artist who has managed to make a name for themselves in the last 10 years who wasn't already more or less a pro

>>7650356 (OP)
>How does someone even get recognized now for their work?.

I don't. After 4 years I decided to give up and just focus on what I enjoy. If niggers don't follow me then fuck them. I don't make any money.... yet. I refunded my patrons too. I heavily censor my artwork just to fuck with people because I dislike them.

The rest of the internet is probably making money from advertising.
Pandering to loser followers or try to raise above the rest is up to you.

>>7650383
>make a name for themselves
define this before you move the goalposts

>>7650388
relatively popular, on par with someone like craig mullins, ruan jia, karla ortiz, james jean, etc.
some literal who random faggot with 20k followers doesn't mean shit.

>>7650391
Just off the top of my head, Christophe Young, Yuming Li. Think they both started within the last 10 years.

>>7650401
never heard of christophe young so i'm putting him in the literal who category. yuming li joined instagram in 2016 so that's 9 years ago, barely making the cutoff point so you got me there on a technicality, but it's far harder to build a following on instagram now as an artist than it was in 2016.

1. be consistent
If you stick to fandoms and consistently draw art, you will be noticed. Then, its all up to how good and soulful your art is.
2. be soulful
there are so many artists that are render monkeys and there are even more artists every day mastering AI so they will always draw "better" than the average jackass on /ic/. You need to have more soul than them in order to stand out, which is quite easy to do.

>>7650391
Half of those people are corporate faggots who make money by sucking up to Mr Goldcock (MBA).

If those are the people you look up to then you're in for an ego death when you realize you wasted years idolizing art made at the behest of corporations that are trying their damnedest to reach the widest, lowest common denominator of spendthrifts. When you find art that actually, truly moves you you'll fucking sit in your room for a good while wondering what the fuck happened, and the reason people who you find strange call shit you don't see the appeal of "underrated" will finally make sense.

>>7650414
how much money did you make last month off of your art, or are you 12 yrs old and larping as some kind of art connoisseur? why don't you enlighten me to who the real artists are then.

>>7650418
How about you actually address what I said? I didn't say they aren't real artists, I said they make money by doing the equivalent of pressing their faces deep into the cracks of people sitting above them on the corporate ladder and thanking the millionaires when they fart a few thousand into their waiting mouths, all while said corporate overlords are pissing on the general population and telling them it's raining.

If you idolize those people then you should be willing to do the same hard social work they do! And not be surprised as to the motives of their employers and clients, who don't care about them at all

>>7650420
i dont idolize any of them, i'm using them as a baseline for financial success as an artist, which is what this thread is about.
why am i not surprised you won't give an example of artists you like. fuck off faggot, you sound like either a bot or some clueless 12 yr old midget zero.

>>7650420
"And the corporations sit there in their corporation buildings, and see they're all corporation-y"

>>7650424
>i'm using them as a baseline for financial success as an artist
If that's your "baseline" then you're beyond lost. That's somewhere around the TOP of the field.

Most guys are like this one:
https://youtu.be/MXLPNgKoFco

In that he says he has to have multiple income streams and relies on his wife's income and health insurance, and has had to do so for the longest time. And that it's a normal thing in the industry.

If you want to do that work then go on and try, I am just telling you what using them as your example entails and that if you approach art with the perspective that the "top" are just people who work for corporations that are actively anti-consumer, then you don't really know enough about art to be worrying about being a professional at it.

>>7650436
>If that's your "baseline" then you're beyond lost. That's somewhere around the TOP of the field.

yeah no shit retard i'm using that as an example of how this kind of level of professional success no longer happens.

>>7650436
most of the "artists" here looking up financial success couldn't sell water to a thirsty man
and just use big names as buzzwords
its like sportsball normies using messi and lebron james as a baseline for when THEY themselves will of course be rich and famous
>>7650439
It happens, you just have to suck dick and take it up the ass until the current 1% in your field dies and hope the son of some guy which your boss owes a favor doesn't call it in
like my boy if you think any industry is the meme of shaking the managers hand and working hard, tell your boomer parents to shut the fuck up

>>7650439
You're asking a stupid question then. You might as well list Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and Dale Earnhardt and then ask if it's possible to make a name for yourself outside of football(us) or football anymore or if other sports are dead.

>>7650444
dumb comparison because getting noticed by scouts as an athlete is completely different than being picked up by an algorithm. sports are a far easier field to judge success on based on metrics than something as subjective as art.

>>7650448
None of the people you listed have "made it" because of an algorithm, dumbass.

>>7650458
that was exactly my point you fucking stupid cunt, the examples i listed made it /before/ things like algorithms, reels, bots, and ai made the landscape impossibly competitive.

>>7650391
>>7650414
NOt that anon however
>When you find art that actually, truly moves you you'll fucking sit in your room for a good while wondering what the fuck happened, and the reason people who you find strange call shit you don't see the appeal of "underrated" will finally make sense.

This is why I exclusively consume content only made by actual schizophrenics.

>>7650470
You had no point then, you don't know enough about what you are talking about, your emotional reaction is synthesized from incomplete info. You are filling the holes in your observations with assumptions that you got from seeing other people dooming, and are operating purely on vibes of hopelessness which you try to retroactively justify.

Stop worrying about making money with your art and just draw or paint or vector or whatever it is you do. Gain some better understanding through study and practice, because at the moment you have no fucking grasp of what makes art valuable in the first place, why someone would pay an artist, why people even bother spending their time keeping up with what artists make and what kind of person does the last two.

>>7650484
you sound like you make zero dollars off of your work, literally the last person i want to talk to about this. stop trying to sound like you know what you're doing bro, nobody with a brain reads the shit you type and buys into a word of it.

>>7650356 (OP)
Artist's whose style and art would immediately get recognised were always the cream of the crop, and not the average artist. Firstly, do you even have an artstyle that's so distinct that it would stand out from the crowd? Even if you did, you would then need an audience, and then to top it off, you would need an audience who is quite devout to your work so that they pour their attention on it and notice the smaller details compared to the usual quick appreciations that art usually gets these days.

I think Nat the Lich, for example, has successfully pulled this off.
An artist I really like, Yev-san, has the distinct style that I can point out whenever they post, but they likely haven't got the large audience for them to have become really distinguished.
So it's a matter of skill, and luck, as is most things in this type of industry.

>>7650412
How does one obtain this power.
This ...soul.?

>>7650412
What is soul, anon?

>>7650356 (OP)
>How does someone even get recognized now for their work?
Don't ask me.

>>7650412
>fandoms
>soulful
pick one and only one

>>7650486
>proving what I said by pivoting to adhom based on assumptions instead of engaging with any of the points

If you think algorithms are so fucked then just go through alternative routes.

Here, I'll spoonfeed you the answers:
To get a decent job, you cannot just send resumes out into the void and hope the algorithm saves you
To get noticed by people who would pay you for your art, you cannot simply post art into the void and hope the algorithm saves you

The purpose of these algorithms is to FILTER. You need to understand that they are not a replacement for actually interacting with people, and you need to have something to offer outside of such tools.

The people who get good jobs are doing research on the companies, going to events for their industry, and schmoozing. They are not sitting in their home praying for one of the 500 jobs they applied for to call back. They are not using their shitty retail job's vacation days to relax, but are instead using them as a resource for moving past that point.

Similarly, the best professional users of social media are not only social media famous, they use social media as one marketing tactic among many, and pay to have it work for them. The point is to reach the people whose brains are tuned to where they see your art and it moves them enough to want to see more of it, to want to pay you so you can make more and won't starve. It's in their interests that you are kept alive and not overly stressed, with occasional desire to collaborate (commission) by paying you to perform a service for them. That is what paying artists is for outside of corporate jobs.

As a final note, the corporate jobs are not that. Media companies have engineered themselves to no points of failure now, they genericized their brands so that no artist has large leverage to demand more, they can just swap in some dude from across the world who is more willing to work for peanuts.

>>7650412
>If you stick to fandoms and consistently draw art, you will be noticed.
yup this!

>draw genshin stuff
>at convention with my ita bag and it has some stickers I made of my genshin boys
>some genshin cosplayer recognizes the art
>them: wait are you [name]
>WHAT
>turns out they've been following me on twitter since last year
>we both freak out, me over meeting a fan who recognized and knew my stuff, them over meeting an artist they like

Become a drawfag. Most boards have draw threads you can join.
Don't just throw random drawings into the social media black hole. Join a community. Don't expect them to find you.

>>7650383
That girl who made Andy and Leyley

>>7650383
>name one artist who has managed to make a name for themselves in the last 10 years who wasn't already more or less a pro
Khyleri, he's one of the most popular artists on social media, he's got millions of followers and he's making 6 figures... Since you said 10 years then there's also Gabriel Picolo, millions of followers, pro comic artist and he's a millionaire.
They weren't good or near pro artists till a few years ago, you can see them learn to draw from BEG on their socials and they improved a lot.

>>7651416
>Popopoka
Guy who did the blind girl comics. Doing VERY well for himself, somehow. Despite being a weird goblinmode french guy
>Joel Guerra
ENA, doing pretty well for himself
>Kaaatie
Made Fundamental Paper Education, then had a mental breakdown from the success, curled up and shriveled into a corncob before vanishing
>Liam Vickers
Murder Drones, don't know much about this personally but I assume he's doing well given how successful it seems

Can keep going on and on if you want more indie people, but there's loads of evidence out there if you just look around.

Or if you stop and realize that fucking everything has to be created by some person or another, and internet shit is more likely to be made by a dude and not a committee.

>>7651416
>Gabriel Picolo
he started his instagram in 2013
Khyleri makes generic anime trash, might as well be ai at this point, if you pump out enough of this garbage fast enough sure you can have a big following of virgins. Same deal for Popopoka.
Pic related is Joel Guerra. Good for him for making it but this is bad. Seems like he does a lot of videos and reels which just proves my point. Same deal with this Liam Vickers, just animation stuff.
This is all garbage that panders to 8th graders.

A lot of this is fandom, or animation, or whatevery cheesy cartoony slop the algorithm loves because pre-teens on phones have all day to consume this awful shit. Depressing.

>>7651179
i already addressed this in the op, trying to do what you are suggesting by networking and playing the social media game takes an incredible amount of time. It's essentially a job just trying to get people to look at your work, on top of making the actual work, and having to pay the bills on top of that. It's too time consuming. Meanwhile the bigger artist have enough money to outsource that work to editors to shoot their reels and manage their accounts, the kids are using ai, and the algorithm is boosting anime and fandom slop because 12 year olds with infinite free time eat that shit up. The odds are heavily stacked against anyone trying to do anything even remotely original.

>>7651605
Yes you need to spend 20-30% of your ART TIME on marketing if you hope to be a professional. That means that if you structure your art as a full time job, you are doing around 10 hours a week on networking and marketing.

This doesn't even come into the part where you're also dealing with overhead - talking to clients, dealing with paperwork (taxes, insurance, regulations, etc anything related). The actual "drawing as part of work" part of being a self-employed artist can easily be only about 15-25 hours a week.

Yes that means that to get any good you ALSO have to be drawing FOR YOURSELF in your off hours.

There are some silver linings. If you're in the US or a similar non-shithole country, then anything you want to pay for to boost your art - subscriptions, marketing agencies, etc. - are writeoffs and reduce your taxable income when you spend the money on them. If you're in some godawful place like Italy or Spain then you are fucked though, sorry!

>It's essentially a job just trying to get people to look at your work
Yes! That is why people get paid to do it. Welcome to being self-employed. It is hard work, but liberating. It has ALWAYS been this way.

>to outsource that work to editors to shoot their reels
This is doable on your own easily. There's auto-clipping tools now and other shit. You don't have to manually fucking deal with that if you're just making reels of working on your stuff.

A big key is that many people just film hours and hours and then pare that shit down to drip feed clips of like 3 work sessions every few days for a month or so. If you're rotating between pieces this is made even easier.

>The odds are heavily stacked against anyone trying to do anything even remotely original.
No they're just stacked against the tech-illiterate. If you don't want to deal with it the gallery scene still exists, but you still have to do all the networking stuff just in person. And you need to be doing trad art.

>>7651626
the gallery stuff is unfortunately going to be somewhat tied to your social media presence. if your work is decent but you've got 83 followers with 13 likes on each post it makes you look bad. It's like picking up girls, whether you're doing that online or in person, as soon as they see your shit social medias they're gonna want to bail.
I don't have time for all this networking shit, I need to work a real job. If what you're saying is actually feasible then show me someone who has actually managed to make that happen, because I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing the most success going to anime and anime trash, fandom garbage, coomer slop, and meme shit - stuff that the algorithms love because there's already a huge audience for it. Where are all these great artists out there beating the system, because I'm not seeing it.

>>7651641
>I don't have time for all this networking shit, I need to work a real job.
Then you have the money to pay people to do things for you, and art can be a cozy supplement to your main income.
... Or are you assuming art is a lucrative field that will get you out of wagie hell with more money and time? The benefits are the emotional relief of having absolute control over your income and the ability to make money doing what you want.
Artists generally are of at least 1 lower income bracket than their parents, and tons are on public assistance of some sort.

Pic somewhat related.

>>7651661
Doing what though to make money? I asked this in the op, comic books, tattooing, street artist, gallery work, etc. I'm fine with making this just a small portion of my income but I'd want to make some kind of money, rather than just depressing post it online and get no traction while I'm getting lapped by 12 year old animefags in jakarta.

>>7651674
>rather than just depressing post it online and get no traction
Well if you can't dedicate a lot of time to marketing then you need to have a minimum amount of skill to compensate for it. The time you DO spend has to be on the most valuable shit, and as I said it means paying for the marketing analytics and so on so you can make the right decisions.

You have to know people outside of social media who can vouch for you as well. One cannot make art in a vacuum and expect people to just stumble upon it.

>comic books, tattooing, street artist, gallery work, etc.
You are looking at this from the wrong angle. You make art first, this becomes your proof of work. Once you have a substantial body of work it functions like a portfolio.
If you are just trying to use art as a hustle then you're going to have a bad fucking time. Just invest instead. It takes less time, less energy, and you get to see number go up without having to dump tons of effort into making a drawing or painting or something first.

>>7651700
i've already made work, but it's just one offs. random drawings and paintings. I'm beyond the beginner stage but I've just been making work alone and not showing it to anyone, I'm just a hermit. I have the chops to make pro work, I just don't know where tf to go with it. Concept art work seems to be all over the place now, where you need 3d skills and they're asking people to essentially take over 2 or 3 people's jobs instead of just drawing or painting. Social media is insanely saturated, and trying to like and follow and talk to other artists is incredibly cynical as everyone is out there starving and hustling so they all want followers but try to keep their ratios up to look legit. I don't know what to do with the work, or where to show it, or how to network. I've spent literally days trying to do nothing but the networking and it is so incredibly slow and depressing. I'd rather spend that time making art.

>>7650356 (OP)
>how does someone get recognized now for their work?
>how to legit build up a decent following or get established now?

2 statements that can go together but arent the same.
first of, you can grow by creativity or skill, by far, creativity is more easy to accomplish than skill on this land called ic, so if you arent the kind of people who see/hear something and can come with something that evoke feelings (joy, sadness, lust, le funny) you are basically screwed. for skill, well, in the same way, being good isnt enough, there should be something that you do different: render, color, proportions, perspective, etc. that really makes ur art stand above others. im not saying you need pro levels but you need to already be scratching these to be consider good.

in the other hand, getting followers goes thru the same path, but the main problem isnt getting followers, is engagement. i see retards who can barely draw a human figure and fall for the flavor of the month in a gooner situation or fetiches just to eventually lose engagement. i would prefer having 1k followers with 100 comments, than having 100k followers and my post not even reaching 5k likes and less than 20 comments.

the main thing is really outstanding, you have to bring a style so unique that it gets burn on people minds, just the smallest resemblance of it on another people artwork should have them say "is this an anon copycat?"

but i guess grinding anime heads and creating threads to discuss meaningless things here is better than developing style.

>>7651725
ok what platforms am i suppose to be using to get this kind of traction? because instagram seems to be all reels now, doesn't look like pictures get much momentum going which is why every artist now has to do a bunch of gay reels. I'm literally seeing artists with millions of followers uploading reels of them eating dumplings and posting political memes or cat videos just to try to increase their reach. Trying to just post drawings and paintings isn't going to get you much of anything.

>>7651725
well the faggot op would just move goal posts when he gets an answer he doesn't like and make up excuses. this is one example >>7651600
He's just another doomshitter who is trying to cope.

>>7651600
>he started his instagram in 2013
He's dogshit back then, just look at his DA in 2014, his breakthru came in 2017~2019 doing his daily challenge + DC comics hiring him.

>>7651735
anon, it depends on you.
lets say you want to go instagram, as you said instagram. as you said, the real game is on reels for numbers, but even with that being the meta the truth is that ur art still have to be good or creative. i have seen really good edits with less than 1k likes on ig because the art isnt that good but some people literally put 3-4 drawings with the most random song and still get thousands of likes (pic related)

now, dont get fooled by numbers, these big numbers on reels, these should be engagement posts, these reels should be just an excuse for people to click on your profile and see more of that amazing art. there is where most people fail, they maybe had a hit reel but people go to their profiles and see the same drawings that you put on the reel and nothing more they wont follow you, is almost biblical how people dont engage with "like farmers" if all you want is numbers, even normies cant tell.

>>7651756
yeah he had a verified account by 2017, back when a blue checkmark actually kind of meant something. Point is he didn't have to swim against the tide of how things work now. It's a much different landscape than what it was between 2013-2017

>>7651713
>I'm just a hermit
Art-as-a-job is for extroverts. It's being an entertainer. If you LOSE energy interacting with people then you're an introvert, which means you're not cut out for doing it for money without tremendous effort. Just make what you like in your own time for yourself and enjoy it, share it if you like. Don't chase the numbers and money with it.

>>7651735
>. I'm literally seeing artists with millions of followers uploading reels of them eating dumplings and posting political memes or cat videos just to try to increase their reach
You're supposed to upload reels OF YOU MAKING ART. Those people are just being retarded. Those reels either aren't the reason for their popularity and they're flailing around not knowing wtf they're doing, or they're dropped focusing on being artists and are just social media personalities now.

This anon is correct:
>>7651725
>>7651758

>>7651740
fuck off weeb, i'm not interested in your anime dogshit "artists"

>>7651735
>because instagram seems to be all reels now
insta died the moment recent hashtags tab was removed. You can never see new post in a hashtag ever again, unless it's from a popular account. If you're new, you're way better off sticking to tiktack, twatter, and even reddit. Youtube works as well, but you might have a hard time on there unless you're an animator.

>>7651779
fuck off, retard. It's that shitty mindset of yours is why you're in this position right now. Change that dogshit attitude of your and maybe you wouldn't be like this.

>>7651788
>meme reels
kys

>>7651792
sorry your dogshit ideas are worse than meme reels.

>>7651795
not interested in making shitty animations for pre-teens bro but go ahead and do your thing.

>>7651792
>animation is time consuming and expensive
>Independent animators decide to be able to animate more by making short things with simple designs
Your expectations are so warped

>>7651813
Then
Don't
Do it

Make art you like

>>7651816
>Make art you like
he can't because the garbage he likes get no followers or traction. The faggot rather sperg out than actually draw.

>>7651821
i like drawings and paintings, not gay anime shit or retard meme reels for toddlers. you faggots are posting examples of pewdiepie tier content.

>>7651823
tell me what ideas do you have or stuff do you even like then?

>>7651823
100 likes is 100 people enjoying your shit
>buh buh that's not 6-7 digits it feels so small
imagine 100 dicks in your asshole instead then

>>7651827
i like painters and illustrators, a wide range. kent williams, tomer hanuka, yoshitaka amano, neo rauch, albert oehlen, cecily brown, ashley wood, etc.

>>7651836
Ok, so basically you want your art to be apart of a comic/video game? Those are very oversaturated, but just go indie and come up with concepts that people like or never done before.

>>7651841
i would be open to anything, literally, even street portrait or birthday parties, i don't care, just trying to figure out how to many any kind of money from art in this current landscape.

>>7651844
>just trying to figure out how to many any kind of money from art in this current landscape
Why do you want ART to be your means of making money? Why not just invest?

>>7651844
>i would be open to anything,
>say shit like this >>7651792
>>7651779
>>7651600
when given a couple of suggestions earlier in the thread
right....

>>7651856
any avenue of making money, not any kind of content. i would do street portraits but not interested in doing coomer shit or drawing brainrot anime.

>>7651853
because art is all i want to do, i don't want a wife, i don't want a house, i don't want vacations, i don't want a boat, i just want to paint. if i can make some money out of it then that means i can afford to work slightly less on other jobs and spend more time painting.

>>7651860
well you don't have to do coom anime shit, even though most of the earlier examples weren't. Street portraits make no money by it self. If you want to do that combine that with a youtube/ tiktack.

>>7651860

>>7651880
yeah i've seen people posting about things like doing caricatures or being a live event artist, but just like any other venue for art i don't know how to break into any of them.

>>7651867
>>7651884

Yea you're a fucking introvert. You cannot just sit in your room and paint and make money.

Any job that requires you to sit and deal with information (art is information) is inherently going to require you spend a lot of time dealing with people. Doing shit that requires physical labor is how you avoid dealing with people, because you are dealing with the physical problems that people don't want to get near instead because they are dirty and/or require lots of technical expertise.

Very very few artists are able to "just paint and receive money somehow" without any kind of hitting the street (metaphorically) to make connections.

If you want to do live shit you have to actually go find people who already do it and contact them and ask them for advice. They may want payment for helping you or they may point you to some agency or some shit.

>>7651875
>merri "my elf oc got carried by pornfags so hard while i post porn of her on patreon" vius

>>7651962
What ideas do you have and what stuff do you like? Show examples

>>7651993
You paying for those ideas, merrivius?

>>7652025
oh snap

>>7652025
Yep, just a retard that wants to mindless argument at others being successful. That’s why you’re in multiple other threads coping/doom posting.