So yeah. For some odd reason, even though I'm 22 years old, work full-time, and live on my own, I have nothing better to do than get involved in crap on deviantART.
I am, of course, referring to the little escapade that recently happened with =
snapesnogger. Anyone who has been around deviantART for at least as long as I have (not even a month, i think) has probably heard of her or seen her pictures on dev's frontpage favorites.
So here's the deal. I have nothing against her art. But I do have something against her behaviour (weird random British u?). Funny fact, ss is on pretty much every internet art community in existence. If you go Google her screen name you'll see what I mean. But whatever, it's cool you want to get your art out and have people know you.
But here's the issue. She doesn't do it to get her art known, she does it to get herself known. The reason I have come to this conclusion is mainly because of her journals, comments on her pictures, and reactions to what the professional artistic community calls a "critique" : 2 : the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature; also : writings expressing such evaluation or analysis. Any time she is given a well thought critique she takes the negative aspects of it and thinks they are personal attacks. A critique does two things: points out an artists strengths, as well as defines their weaknesses. This helps the artist realise what they did correctly so they can continue doing it, as well as explains what they need to improve to make their art better.
I would now like to direct you to this
[link] Snapesnogger is, of course, the OP and the person with the sn Snogger. Read through there and you will understand completely what I am talking about, unless of course you either 1) also can't take artistic critique or 2) are a mindless fan of ss that thinks I don't like her because I'm not as good of an artist as her (which isn't necessarily true).
On her journals she posts personal complaints that boast her popularity or ego, my favorite one (that she probably deleted) was "how come some of my pics that had like 1000+ favorites aren't that way anymore? It's not a big deal, but I'm just wondering." As if anyone besides the DA staff knows why something on the site is functioning incorrectly. But I view this as a ploy for attention, to get all her fans to say "we still
your art!
s to you!" The reason is because she said herself that she sent a bug report to the DA staff, so why do we need to know your pictures aren't showing as many favorites as before? In reference to the above example from conceptart.org, she posted a journal on DA about how they were "being mean" to her on the CA forums, so her fankids came over to the site to support her and tell all the professional artists that frequent that site can shove it, because her art is the way it is because it's her "style". Even though their art has been published, viewed my millions of people in video games, printed comics, galleries, etc. As though the sweat and blood they've poured into their possibly hundreds of drafts of the same picture or idea doesn't mean they might know a little more about art than a Joe Schmo fan that happens to know how to copy DBZ art pretty well.
And you know, I tried. My first post on her site was a pretty nice critique. I'd link it except I can't find it now. She responded with "I'm sorry you think I'm not good enough" or something along those lines. Then I responded nicely to that message, saying I never said that, I'm just giving you some hints on how to make your art, even your "style", better. After that I lurked her art for a while, seeing if anything I said in my critique helped at all, or if she tried any of those things out. And of course, she didn't, so I left another critique of one of her scraps that was a little harsher, and she didn't respond to that.
So around this time I started realizing all the things she does that bugs people on DA, CA, and /b/. It's not that her art's bad. Infact, some of it is good, and has potential. It's that she refuses to take any kind of feedback except "this is so cute!" or "I'm totally in love with you...I mean your art lol". Once again, shameless attention catching, nothing that actually means anything or whatever. And it's because she's had 3.2 million pageviews, some of her pics have thousands of favorites. I think that she thinks she'll be able to tell a publisher who rejects her work that "people on DA like it!" as if that will sway their opinion. Her number of pageviews and such also reflects on the DA community some. DA has quite a number of good artists, all who know how to conduct themselves as artists, etc. But it has even more people that are simply fans (of anime) and favorite anything that looks like cool "manga" or is of a series that they watch on Cartoon Network.
Anyway, after I figured out all this, she posts a whammie of two of her snake characters having an "intimate moment", which (in the uncensored version) looks more like a scene out of La Blue Girl or something. If you know about anatomy or artistic expression you'll understand what I mean. I'd post a link, but she doesn't like me because of the very harsh critique I did of her last piece, and I'm afraid she'd report me. I did a very harsh critique because I feel she didn't even try on this picture, the anatomy was all wrong, the expression was all wrong, there was no background, and the coloring was hasty. I also felt she was starting to post sexually graphic art as a ploy for more attention, since she had also recently joined another community called Fur Affinity because they were more "open minded" and she could post her graphic art (you can guess by the name of the site the sort of artists that frequent there). I feel strongly that if you are trying to make a picture of an intimate moment, even if it involves sex, it should not show a huge penis or any vaginal fluids running down the girl's leg/snake body. Because this is not intimacy, it is only sex, and is made to arrouse people sexually. So the picture was just very technically wrong, and I called her out on it.
Anyway, she of course got mad, which was partially explainable due to my tone, but it even prompted her to write a journal which she has since deleted and another one to explain why she deleted the first one, and then she also deleted the second one. Since then I've recently been posting smartass/snide comments on her journals and her fan's comments, because I'm sick and fucking tired of it all.
But then I realized that all I needed to do was remove her from my watch list, so I did. And I guess I just wanted to vent all this crap, even though it's not really worth getting worked up about. So I guess, if anything, I'm sorry to you artists that make up the actual artistic backbone of DA that I wasted my time on DA, and yours. I will be working more on drawing, and posting some of the things I do for you all to look at, and of course, critique.
But before I sign off, I want everyone to know: if you have dreams of becoming an artist, or a character designer, or a comic artist, manga artist, animator, or whatever, and plan to live off of it, you'd better get used to people critiquing and also just generally not liking your work. Bosses and clients will tell you outright that your work sucks, not give you critiques. And if you can't suck it up, you won't get hired or be fired very quickly.
And a word to Ss, if she reads this: I don't hate you or your art, I'm just not interested in participating in your artistic progression anymore.
Aroused
