Criticism of your artwork is often beneficial to improving it

 

There are a lot of artist, but some artist don't like to have their work criticized, others such as myself are perfectly okay with it and don't get bent out of shape if someone mentions a few negatives about their work. In fact I've had people actually come to me directly and tell me about the things they didn't like in some of my art, and I always laughed it off because I found it amusing vs being offended. For instance a Spanish artist I know who I am good friends with is very open about the futanari content, by open I mean he's openly critical of it. 

Earlier today he told me "You create some of the sexiest women, but then you ruin them when I see dick!" And we just laugh because it's funny. Then I explained to him how I'm just crazy for futanari content but I don't add dicks on every girl and even thought about kicking futa's entirely out of my Raizen Fury series because futas and a series about gang violence doesn't work very well together. But Raizen Fury isn't entirely about gang violence, just the initial parts of the series is related to that.

I have reviewed the work of numerous artist over the years and most of them I talked to about it or knew them long enough to even blog about their work. So far I've not met a single artist that's gotten upset with me over a review I made about their content.  If anything they get extremely excited about them. DesireSFM has read my long ranting reviews about his own content not once but multiple times when he has nothing else to do and can just read the whole thing.

He strongly appreciates all the effort and passion that goes into them and because of the first review I did of his work back when he released Miranda in Charge, it convinced him to go all out Futanari and I'm still very proud of that -laughing- Metrionme has told me that reviews of his work gave him a reason to work harder and inspires him to do better each and every single time. If you have seen any of his content over on Pixiv or wherever he may post uncensored vers, you can tell that the content is a whole lot better after all these years.

Knowing that I can make a positive impact on other artist versus pissing them off just because I mention a few negatives here and there when I've had others do it to my work before without getting upset. It is a sign of artist maturity. There was only one artist I can think of who's art I slightly criticized because they were using the Denoiser feature in Daz Studio for their images and I told them that the feature killed the quality of their work and made it looked muddy, which it did. The denoiser is good for test renders, but it's a foolish mistake to use it for the final image you intend to post unless you just don't care about having ugly renders with the quality of it being heavily reduced.

So they got upset with me and un-followed me on pixiv, I just laughed it off and moved on. I mean hell I was trying to help them by offering them advice. I know a few artist who come to me all the time asking me for advice about things. With that said, having your work criticized and or critiqued isn't a bad thing unless someone was just bashing the hell out of you.

There was one die hard fan that wrote a review about my art on Pixiv in a private message when he asked me if I would be offended if he told me what he thought of some of my work. I told him he was free to speak his mind about it and I wouldn't get upset. So he wrote his review, granted it's not as detailed as mine are but I appreciated him giving his thoughts about my content. Some of it was good, some of it wasn't so well received but I still didn't throw a fit and block or ban the guy. There are some artist that will overreact if you critique their work and do exactly that. Has it happened to me yet? No, -laughing- I know a lot of mature artist and they understand I mean no harm to them when I review their work. 

Having your content critiqued can help you if the person critiquing your work is someone that understands art or they point out certain things you may not have noticed. If someone notice you have pokethroughs in your 3D renders, or that a scene looks washed out or too dark. These are good things to be aware of if someone points them out if you didn't notice it yourself or just overlooked it.

No one has ever criticized my lighting, that's where I get the most praise aside from how I write up my stories and create all my characters and the original ideas I put together. An artist must be aware that criticism isn't personal or intended to give you doubts, although it can be at times. There are modest critics and then there are those who will bad mouth the hell out of you if they really REALLY hate the content you are creating. 

There are a lot of ways to give criticisms of someone's work, and there are ways you can handle that criticism. But it's also very important to understand that just because someone says they don't like a certain thing you do with your art, that it means they are being mean spirited. I know plenty of people I chat with that don't care for dickgirls at all, and they are very honest and open about it too. Still we always joke and laugh, I don't take it to heart at all if they don't like it because I understand.

I know for a fact back when a lot of my images use to suffer from extreme darkness, no one ever bothered to tell me that my scenes were too dark. I wish they had of, because if they did I could have corrected a lot of art I threw away that I didn't keep DUF files of, so I could go back and fix them. Instead I caught on to these flaws myself over time.

Honest criticism is better than dishonest criticism, people use to do that back when I started out with Poser 7...My art was terrible in 2012 when I first bought Poser and people would just tell me how great my art was....It was dishonest criticism. Some people will avoid telling you what they think because they don't want to hurt your feelings. Truth is, I'm not fragile when it comes down to my own content. Hell I'll criticize my own work to hell and back if I know there's something about it I don't like. Believe me I can be my own worse critic. But if something is shit, then it's shit and I'll tell myself that it's shit. I don't want someone else to call my art shit -laughing- but if they did, maybe it's the ideas I created that made them think that way if they just really hate it.

But in the end, my own criticism of my own content helped me to better understand myself as an artist, and how to also better understand other artist too. I can be brutal and I can be extremely critical, it depends on certain factors. An artist can be very good at drawing or rendering their scenes. I generally don't even bother to discuss art here that I strongly hate or even appose. If I did it would be one of those rare topics.