Places to share art and connect with other people
Sylvan
Posts: 2,684
I am a little out of the loop. I am curious what are some good places to share (3D) art and connect with fellow creative people?
I used to be on DA and a few forums but they either have stopped excisting or aren't as active anymore.
One of the main things I am looking for is to connect with people more. Covid, work and life in general has made my circle quite smaller.
Aside from the DAZ forums, where have you guys and gals been hanging out?
Post edited by Sylvan on
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Honestly? You're not going to like the answer.
Facebook.
I share my art in a few places...DeviantArt, ArtStation (only the best goes on ArtStation), and Facebook. I had started to post on Twitter but cut that due to *insert political rambling here*. But Facebook is pretty much the only place (other than here) where I get people actually talking.
That is sad that FB is the place. I have an account, but only because I had to for the Quest 2, but never post there. I thought about posting at Artstation at one time, but to me that place if more of "I am a professional 3D creator and this is the project I am working on" type of place. i do post on twitter, but like you said, it is all about politics and social topics which I really enjoy and not art.
I'm also not privately on Facebook anymore, same as with Twitter. The politics and fights were getting to me.
I do have business accounts but I only use them to contact other businesses.
Artstation, I have an account but as you mentioned, that is also more professional and not for banter or convo's.
My kid who is a young adult uses Discord to connect and share her work, but that isn't the kind of thing I am looking for as there is no real space to create portfolio's, it just scrolls along.
I have been looking around and I saw lots of people with the same question. It seems there isn't really an alternative to DeviantArt at the moment that has a large reach. I have been looking at Tumblr but that also hasn't clicked for me. Seems like there is a hole in the market!
DeviantArt has always been my favorite. Admittedly, I havent been on there in a while, but that's nothing to do with the site, I just haven't been on any sites in a while. I am trying to get back into being active on social media, and DeviantArt is still my first choice. There's also a DAZ3D subreddit, it's not huge, but it seems to have a regular stream of people.
Here, (*big grin *) use the Gallery.
No. Nice try though.
And @Sylvan Seriously, I use to work for a fortune 500 marketing company so I know a little about marketing and niches. Art is truly a matter of personal taste. So what is good for one may suck for another. I think Behance is a great place to check out for like-minded ppl. I used to ask my clients what their goals were. Because where you hang out only matters if you know why you want to hang out. The truth is I am here at DAZ to buy stuff, not make friends. That is my priority here. So where it would benefit you to hang out depends on what your goals are. If you want to hang out with buyers, you have to know your target market. If you want to hang out with peers you still have to choose your niche, whimsical, historical, sci-fi, npr etc and I would still recommend Behance. Knowing your niche is really important. Who do you imagine appreciating, critiquing or buying your art? Who do you want to show off your creations to? Are you struggling with a software? Do you need to hang out with specific software users eg AI PS etc, or do you want to step up and show your portfolio to ppl who would appreciate it? The whole world does not want to see your art or read my books, but loyal fans and die-hard niche followers and fellow niche-driven artists are golden. I write memoirs under my name and other genres under pen names, targeting various ages and interest groups would be all over the Richter scale otherwise. We all have have a genre we prefer and hopefully have mastered or want to master, be it sci-fi, fantasy, historical, and we all have a delivery medium. So age targeting your niche audience is crucial. Age-wise, Facebook is great for ppl mid-thirties to mid-forties. Twitter is something else but targets the same age group. I struggled to get decent followers on twitter, but after drinking a few glasses of vino I created a profile for one of my characters, (a ghost who hated her afterlife shrink) and got 769 within a day or so. Since them some Star Wars fan did the same thing. When I posted on my original author page that I should do her in, have her murdered in my next book, because she was more popular than me, Twitter banned me, lol, for hate comments. I had to create a new author account because of a fictional character who ranted and raved about her delusional afterlife shrink. She won, I lost. As for Instagram, that's where the 18-24 year old's hang out but the 25-35 are a close second. So Instagram might be your next best bet to Behance. Find your competitor and hang out there. Competitive rivalry can turn into friendships and collaborations.
+1 @ArtAngel - I did not expect such an interesting and coherent response to come from a throwaway comment. And it doesn't even matter that you were actually replying to someone else.
Yes, DA has a large, vibrant, active Daz user community including multiple groups and actual PAs. A lot of the workshown is NSFW, but it's not a total pornfest like some sites I won't name here. And there is a fair amount of variation.
I look at art by other's on Facebook, most of mine is videos on Youtube so don't really share a lot other than links
Deviant is the best though I did have one tell me I should kill myself. Facebook is soso had few followers Think Facebook and Daz have shares in each other cause I've noticed certain things that are are too much alike. Here nah though I got some good comments from few PAs. Rendo not been to in ages. Artstation like others said. There was a site called Elfwood may have been good once but that died. Myspace still exists don't know if that's ok still.
...avoid Reddit. I was on the Daz Reddit for a while only to discover they have an odd sense of what is OK to post and what isn't.
I've since terminated my membership there and as most here know I don't do provocative or racy scenes.
Does anybody here know World Anvil? If so, could you share your impression, please?
DA is not an art website, it just pretends to be. Pretty obvious when you really browse that website and see all the stuff that has been uploaded. There are maybe even more dick pics on that website than proper art.
Brutaly honest advise about Deviant Art.
Anybody should do him/her-self a favour :
Avoid Deviant Art forum at all cost. Seriously, do NOT go there.
Just stay on YOUR favorite art style side there. Do not go off tracks there
dA was a great place for me until they went bonkers with the AI stuff, using images without consent etc.
I mostly share on twitter where I have a nice circle of other artists and writers, (the political thing asite which is something that might drive me away from there)
but the question is real, there are not many good places. I tried mastodon.art but it doesn't have the right vibe for me.
I am on several discord servers I share but discord is dificult as well, either you got rather small functional servers with a nice community but not much of a reach or you have those giant open servers which are a complete mess, I have one for my own community of Taiduo fans which is nice.
I agree with this. I've known a few people who've had account suspension/ban problems from interactions in the forums. I also avoid those forums like the plague.
The trouble is, from their TOS, there is implied consent. I agree, it does put a chill on posting there. I haven't posted there in over a year and am not convinced I should actually ever post there again. The trouble is, when people can snag images from anywhere and drop them on Imgur and similar services, we as artists lose all control over the use and distribution of our work. That was true long before the AIs became so prominent. Discord has well-known security problems. The whole internet is basically bad for artists, and yet... Try sharing work without sharing anything on the internet. For most people, it's not really going to happen except in the most limited ways. Even then, lots of people take pictures and post them online. Thus, I think control is an illusion. It becomes a problem because artists are largely marginalized workers and many people are of the opinion that artwork is or should be free in the first place. Lots of issues.
I never got how DeviantArt worked... it's oddly "off" somehow... format or something... not quite a forum setup, not quite a social media setup... maybe it's the GUI?... I dunno... too much effort to figure out... maybe I need a premium membership or something?
Either way, I occasionally go back and check, but it's still not worth it... Too bad, because it would be nice if it worked the way I thought it should, I could keep all my writings, dumb images and stupid jokes in one place...
You don't need to buy a premium membership to do what you're talking about doing. That is more for advanced customization and especially monetization. If you focus on your own homepage and your own gallery as a start point, DA has the tools to do what you want to do and you may find audience from doing that. At the very least, it's a convenient repository for work. Eclipse broke a lot of older features that were actually much better for artists and for finding audience. Now, it's trying to be a newer site but still has big pieces of the older site woven into it. And there is the AI issue, if that is an important issue to you. Otherwise, you might try Tumbler or even deposit work on a Patreon account. Then you could also try to collect some money from subscribers. As ArtAngel said before, it depends a lot on your goals.
World Anvil is more like your own personal Wiki for your story or role-playing environment. It has a lot of features, but is a bit complicated because you need to use CSS to customize your page's look. I think the big issue there is that only others in the World Anvil community will really be alerted to any of your updates, so it is not a good place to show off your work like it would be on Facebook or DeviantArt.
Thanks a lot, @SnowSultan, i understand now better!
So most traffic would have to be generated from other platforms / products towards that site. But otherwise you seem to have a rather good impression (for storytellers) if i got that right. Thanks again!
true on all points, honestly everything I post in the net by now is on really low resolution and size in a jpg format, so you can see is well enough but it's useless for stealing
...something I've noticed on DA are submissions that are obvious adverts (not just parodies or fictional ones).. I'm a Core member yet see them all the time. i would think if you have a paid membership you shouldn't see any adverts..
Also, AI submissions are appearing more and more there. I think they should be tagged as such and/or put in a separate category you can select not to show up on your account.
As to the mainstream social media sites, I avoid posting my work to them. I dropped Twitter several months ago and the Daz Reddit last week and don't have accounts on others like Instagram or Discord.
Instagram
I adore WorldAnvil. I've been on there for about two years, and their Discord community is one of my main social outlets online (I don't do Discord servers for stuff usually, either). There's at least one other Daz artist on there who does renders for his book series. The art community is very active, although there aren't a lot of people doing 3D (yet >.>).
I mostly post my art on Cohost, but admittedly one of the reasons I'm there is that I like smaller online circles these days.
Thankyou very much @plasma_ring! That really sounds encouraging, although i am more interested in the tool and platform than in discord atm, but it seems to be a nice place.
As forum i very much enjoy this place btw, lots of nice and helpful people
@Sylvan: Hope you didn't overlook @plasma_ring suggestion as he answered my question: Cohost
The AI submissions are often tagged and you can block the tags thus reducing the incidence of tagged submissions. Untagged are a bit trickier, but I also block identified individuals. It's not nice and I'm happy to do that to them. These days, I see few AI submissions. Ads... I see precious few ads regardless. Most of the ad submissions I see seem to be begging for subscribes or whatever. They're few in number and not much bother to me. Everybody wants a little $$ for their efforts.
...I feel that paying 39$ a year you should see no adverts. That's what other sites and online publications do.