A thread to discuss My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the tie-in media.
All of the usual forum rules
apply. In addition, please remember that the thread is discussing a kids' show, and it's primarily focused on the work itself, not the fanfic — in particular, we don't want to see lewdness creeping in.
Edited by Mrph1 on Aug 26th 2024 at 10:24:26 AM
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I was quoting someone from GoogleTube.
Trust me, if I was actually trying to get in the Tumblr, I would try too hard and fail at making a good post in any stretch of the imagination and I would hate myself.
No joke. How do some of you Tumblr users gain so many followers with your art?
Dakota's blog An odd agent of justiceOkay, I'm going to put this as lightly as possible:
This
is one of your sketches.
This
is a sketch from one of the artists you mentioned.
This is quite a disparity in the quality of the artwork here. To put it bluntly: They're popular because they are very good artists, and frankly, you're nowhere near their level of artistic ability. I could try to give specifics as to why that's evident, but I'm not an artist, and I'm not really qualified to comment.
Reaction Image Repository
I was half expecting the Ice King to bust in and kidnap Elsa or something.
@ King Kix: You're not in the same league as Slugbox. Or the league below that. Or the league below that. Repeat about five more times. It has nothing to do with using pen and ink. I don't know how to say it in any nice way. Your art is bad, and you won't get followers until you actually learn how to draw properly.
One thing that might help would be getting a scanner. Photographing your pictures doesn't result in a very good image, and a lot of them are so faint I can barely make out parts of them.
And, well... -gulp-
Your art just isn't that good. In fact, the quality is childish. For starters, your anatomical proportions are miles off the mark, and inconsistent from drawing to drawing. A lot of your figures appear to be geometric shapes stuck together, and their limbs often bend in the wrong places or in unnatural directions. Your linework is shaky, too.
^ I do, amateurishly, but I don't feel like this is the appropriate time to plug my work.
edited 14th Apr '14 5:50:09 PM by Wryte
@Danny: I dabbled a bit; this
is the best thing I've produced, and less you think I'm competent, I used a reference picture and it still took me about six hours over the course of three days to make it look not like crap.
@Kix: Yeah, honestly, you really need to practice your art before you're going to get lots of followers. Seriously, look up a tutorial on how to draw, say, perspective. Right now they look very scribble-ish. There's no perspective, no proportions, no shading, and in general it looks rather Off-Model. It looks like you're just sort of doodling at random rather than actually trying to learn how to draw. I'm not trying to tell you not to draw or to abandon it or anything. Just... put some effort into learning the skill rather than just drawing stuff like this.
Where you are is a starting point, but you can't stay there.
edited 14th Apr '14 6:10:57 PM by JapaneseTeeth
Reaction Image Repository@ Danny: I'm learning. So far, my best is this
, but most of my stuff is a lot worse. I've slacked off on practicing lately, too.
Better than I can manage. I'd like to start drawing again, but I have little enough time as it is.
I thought pony transmutation was forbidden?
I've heard that drawing shipping helps too. Possibly the reason Feedback is K Egisak's most popular fanfic despite not being all that good.
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's PlayYeah, I can't get away with that during work. I can edit my fanfic while I'm on break, but unfortunately drawing would be too much. Especially since drawing anything takes me forever.
Speaking of fanfic, I'm working on a new oneshot. It's about Celestia's obsession with stained glass windows. Anybody want to look at it?
edited 14th Apr '14 6:21:04 PM by JapaneseTeeth
Reaction Image RepositoryThat's a surprisingly apt description. It reminds me of the kind of thing you draw in school when you're 7.
I don't really draw. I have drawn a few things, but it takes me ages and it's still just average. I'd say the biggest thing I've drawn were all the sprites in this:
Possibly the reason Feedback is Kegisak's most popular fanfic despite not being all that good.
Nyeeeeeeeh yes, that probably is a fair chunk of the reason. At least given it's the only heterosexual shipfic I've done, and features a fairly popular character - admittedly in a form that far diverges from the current accepted fanon.
While I'm far from Slugbox or 3mangos, I have garnered a reasonable degree of popularity - or if nothing else, acclaim - for my various projects, so I do have some inkling of what people want.
Shipping is popular, yes, but I've written much better shipfics that have gotten much less attention. The reason for this, I think, is that those better shipfics tend to be better because they have somewhat heavier content, or I've been playing around with writing techniques, in addition to being about gay stallions pretty much to the last. I hate to go Viewers Are Morons, but the difference, to my mind, comes down to the fact that some are simply a bit more challenging than others. My Time Among Clothes Hangers was explicitly about coming to terms with one's sexuality, which is not an easy subject matter, and people who aren't already interested in The Gays are gonna be turned off by it. Feedback, on the other hand, was a very simple story about an already popular character.
Likewise, The Colour You Bleed did get a decent amount of attention due to featuring a well-known and used character in the form of Blueblood, but was also a lot heavier in tone and in terms of worldbuilding than some other popular adventure stories, so while it's popular it never took off in a huge way. I'd be willing to bet that a large portion of it's popularity was due to the fact I kept a consistent one-chapter-per-week updating schedule. My askblog has started getting more regular followers since I started updating it weekly as well.
So, yes. Consistency, playing to what people already like, being nice without overly daunting, are all good ways to get followers... but frankly those things only help. No matter how consistent or pandering you are, if your stuff isn't good people won't consume. And, frankly, I find the notion of having lots of followers overrated anyways. I prefer acclaim, and the only way to get acclaim is to be good.
Birthright: an original web novel about Dragons, the Burdens of Leadership, and Mangoes.Speaking of accaim, I just discovered that someone did a TAS of my MLP Portal GBA game. Impressive!
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play