First off I would like to apologize for the massive uploads I've been doing as of late. For those who don't know I've been doing art and writing for 10 years now and recently, back in Jan, I had to shut my site down due to the fact that I just could not keep up with all the updates and I wanted to focus more on my art and writing and less on reviews and such. That being said I have a lot of art work and writing that I've been moving here over here the past while. I uploaded a lot back in December and January, but at that time I wasn't going to post my manga projects or my writing here. Then there came a few problems and people wanting the manga here so I decided to post the rest, hence the huge amounts of uploads. I'm sorry for this and I should have it all up rather quickly, more so now that I figured out that I can post several chapters at a time, and then only new art and writing will be uploaded from that point on.

Now for the real reason for this journal post. I've noticed a lot of people on here complaining about not being popular and what have you. I've been meaning to make a post about this for some time, even wrote a really long rant about how silly it all is. Then today I came across a Journal by Misskittyoooo that pretty much summed everything up: [link]

I'll explain how I went about gaining attention for my works in my bio later, but for the most part it was a lot of work. There are many ways to gain attention for your works, but all of it consists of getting off of DA and showing off your works, not pimping your works to the point of getting people sick, but finding communities of like minded individuals that might enjoy your works. I mean before coming here I was moderately known in the shoujo-ai community, on several forums. If I had not taken a 3 year break from art I probably would have more of my old fans here right now, most were lost when I switched from manga to novel writing. But I still go to my old areas and post the occasional piece for people to see.

Then there are conventions. They are the best way to gain exposure and meet other artist as well. You can even see which other artist on DA are going to be at the con and meet up with them. I spent 7 years going to conventions and worked my way from being in the artist alley to the dealers room and finally a guest of honour at several cons. This took a lot of work and I ended up offering a lot of my time to conventions in anyway I could, Creating mascot works, pushing their cons everywhere I went, workshops, panels and what have you. By become a mascot artist it was double exposure, it was giving the con exposure and my art at the same time. It was great fun for the time, but rather stressful. I still get people asking if I'll show up at conventions again, but I'm not sure if I'm up to all of that again.

Another thing to do for anime/manga artist is to join up on Gaia and offer Avatar art to people. Oddly enough the piece of Avatar art I did of my wife and myself drew in a lot of people. People have asked me time and time again to draw more avatar art and to sell it on Gaia, but I'm too busy right now to do that, but I may consider it at a later date. It is still something that many of you can do and it could help out with your skills too, flesh out your sketches and give you more to draw when on those block moments.

But more then anything draw, draw and draw more, or in the case of writings write until you drain your brain of all ideas then post up a storm. I mean over the past couple of months I've ended up with 50 watchers and several thousand page views simply from posting my works like mad and surfing around the site, talking with people in the forums, posting on journals, commenting on art work and all that kind of thing. The more time you spend creating new works the more people will get to see it.

The only thing I don't suggest is drawing something just to get attention. If you just draw what others want it will quickly drain you to a dried out husk and that is something you don't want to do. I remember getting stuck in that, "Must do what others want." phase and it was horrible. It wasn't until I started drawing what I feel like drawing again that I started enjoy art again. I write and draw only what I feel like and don't really give a care if people don't like it. Hell when I was told to not draw blood and stop with the teen fiction I just wrote and drew more. I don't like being told what not to do and it is more likely to make me just do it more to piss the person off.

Also try looking around at what is popular as well and learn from it. I don't copy other styles, I try to figure out what makes it so popular and work with it. Try to understand the nature of the piece more then anything else. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but to tell you I spend days just looking at other peoples art works, watching how they go about colouring and concepts. From photographs to painting, anything that will inspire my mind to draw. I'll try to explain more when I do that photo reference tutorial.

Here is an example of my improvements over the years. Drawing 20 pages a month for over five years really gives you time to improve. It is interesting to see how much my works changed over the years.


Well sorry to ramble. I don't know where I'm going with this. My mind is in quite a muddled state at the time being. I hope this made some sense to you. Just check out that journal I linked to. Things are explained more clearly there.

Well jaa ne

Kat

Here is my list of free sketches that I'm giving away.

10 sketch give away
1. - One of her male character... this is going to be a challenge.
2. - Utena and Anthy
3. - Konoka Konoe and Setsuna Sakurazaki from Negima
4. - a "girlfriend" pic of Tomai and Ayuki from Kasimasi
5. - piece of herself and her girlfriend.
6. - need to find out what she wants
7. - chibi of herself
8.
9.
10.

If you wish to get a few sketch there are four slots left. Check out my post about for the rules regarding this. [link]