Prototyping

Prototyping is a tricky activity to do, and visualising how your content is going to affect your audience is no easy task. For my Instagram DA, I have been trying some different approaches than usual, such as posting lifestyle content on my stories about what I do in my everyday life, and I use it as a journal of sorts, so that people can connect more with me as a person, rather than me just posting artwork, and building up an image.

Existing users on Instagram already post ‘journal-like’ stories, and do many things, like art trades (where one person draws the others original character and both post on their own accounts while tagging the other person) which is basically a way for artists to get more of a following from other circles. I have been doing this in a different format, by doing #DTIYS (which was explained in my previous blog post) as well as straight up drawing things for other people as gifts, and they usually share it on their own stories to show them to their audience as a form of gratitude, which I think has worked well.

I also played around with drawing memes for the Twitter Uni crowd for fun, and even get some exposure for my DA there. So far, it has gained a bit of interaction, but not much, and at this point is only up there to serve as a mark for online interaction and consistency for an audience to see my work.

However, I joined two other DAs (A zine @PineZine and a magazine @ChaeMagazine) for my art for two reasons- I would have more content for my DA in general, as I post it there after my pieces are done, and I can potentially generate a new audience through these DA’s that I entered, however small.

As part of prototyping, I also had to accept that maybe my reach through Instagram wasn’t enough, even thought that is a site most artists use, and I posted a drawing to Reddit to hopefully raise some perception of who I am. There hasn’t been much attention drawn to it, but it was a good venture.

My reach with followers isn’t much, but every time someone comments on my post, I make sure to respond.  I also take the time to respond to other peoples stories and interact with them. My goal is to try and interact with the community and make my circle bigger so I can share artwork and just have a communal interest where we can talk with each other.

I will note that the type of artwork you draw, whether it be realistic, anime, cartoonish; humans or animals, each have their own social circles, and people tend to follow artists with similar styles that they have or look up to. I don’t feel that I have a defined ‘style’ to attract followers of that subset. On the other hand, there is also the question of skill, and how people can box themselves into drawing only one thing and not being able to draw anything else very well, and then as a result they can’t diversify or improve their skill level. Its a personal dilemma that I have very little answers to and will keep searching for.