I'm one of a handful of people who go over to
FA's Crit Board to offer critiques, assistance, redlines, and any number of other ways to help people improve their art. I do tend to enjoy it, but lately, it's just been pissing me off, and I may stop doing it soon.
Yes, I appreciate that art is hard. I've been making art in one form or another for nearly a quarter of a century. I am definitely not the best, and have epic pen control issues sometimes, but I know enough about it to be able to offer help.
But the people that come in asking for help lately have just been getting on my nerves. It's getting to the point that I can fairly accurately predict what their response will be just by their OP.
Most common: post a completed picture, and ask for critique. Picture has been fully rendered and posted to their gallery, so the chances of them actually changing anything is slim to none. Optimistically, they're asking for what they did wrong and what they did right so they know how to apply this to the next one. Instead, they either
- Fuck off and never respond to a single person in their thread
- Insist that everything that is 'wrong' is just 'their style' and that's how they always do it (really? You always draw your characters with one arm having two elbow joints? Interesting)
- Blame the programme/materials they used.
- Delete the post
Every time. I tend not to even comment on finished pieces any more. It's a waste of my time, especially if I do a paint over (which is often the case for finished drawings).
Just after that: post a quick two sentences asking for crit, and then link to their gallery. I HATE these. It's against the forum rules because one of two things always happen:
- Fuck off and never respond to a single person in their thread
- Back track, and claim that the one picture you chose from their gallery was actually off-limits for crit and ignore everything you said
- Delete the post
Any more, one of the other people on the board who is also getting sick of this, picks the weakest picture from their gallery, and goes full out art school critique on it. It's a bit of a dick move, yes, but so is not reading the forum rules that says not to link to your entire gallery in the first place.
Rarely: They come in with a WIP that they're having problems with, and ask for a very specific sort of help. This is exactly what this board is for, and I love when they show up. We've got different people for different sorts of help, but we all know enough to be able to offer something for every sort of help that's needed. These sorts of posts always get really awesome responses, redlines, links to other sites that have tutorials on what they're trying to accomplish, and more. These ones are always really hard to predict what will happen.
- Fuck off and never respond to a single person in their thread
- Insist that everything that is 'wrong' is just 'their style' and that's how they always do it
- Blame the programme/materials they used
- Argue that we don't understand what they're trying to do/insult our intelligence on the matter
- Delete the post
Are you seeing a pattern?
Every so often, they'll actually listen to us, take in our advice, and post again with an updated version. Sometimes, they'll post an updated version and then do one of the above, which is always really baffling. Fairly often, the people coming into the board are looking for some sort of quick fix that they can do to make their art become awesome overnight. We get lots of questions asking about which software/tablet/brand of marker/pencil/whatever to use, and how despite using these brands, their art still isn't improving. Oh, I hate these posts. So much.
I just... guh. I'm sick of spending time to do something for people only to have it kicked back at me. If you're going to ask for help, accept it, even if you don't like the answer. We don't have to offer the help, and loads of people have stopped doing so because it just gets frustrating. I'm sick of it, and I may stop doing it, myself. A couple of days ago, I spent about an hour giving a detailed anatomical breakdown of a character, which included a paint over and loads of links of where to go for more information. So did two other people. The thread is slowly working its way down the board because the OP has vanished.
About a week ago, I did the same thing on a post that was deleted because the OP was apparently upset that a question he asked didn't get answered quickly enough. WTF? We're volunteers. We don't always check the board every day. Give us more than 12 hours to see your question and answer it. This piece was for a commission, which means now that they're probably going to wind up delivering sub-par work. Oh, dear.
I'm done whinging. I'm going to go give my remix story a quick once-over, and actually email it out to be beta-read. Why am I so slow at this? D:
