How to Create an Audience That Follows Your Art - My Strategy

Hey everyone,

Creating a following is a very useful benefit for an artist, as it increases the visibility of your art, laying the groundwork for more opportunities. These opportunities are not limited to new jobs, but also include potential collaborations and communities with which to share your projects, such as comics, anime, games, etc.

In today's article, I want to share a few steps for building a strategy to create a following using your art. This is based on my experience.

Topic of Interest

This point or step is about defining the concept of your art. We often do things we like, but it's worth noticing which of the things we like are the most popular or have high popularity in current times. Asking questions like these will help you choose ideas that not only resonate with you as an artist but also with a great number of people. That is why many artists only do fan arts, as it is one of the quickest ways to get a reaction from a random individual on the internet.

Beyond fan arts of existing franchises, ask yourself what topics from your personal experience others can relate to as well, like personal stories, things you love or hate, particular situations you find interesting (not necessarily personal experiences), recent world events, or trends people are talking about, and so on. I'm sure some of you have already tried this approach, but listing them will give you a more streamlined vision for the next step.

Planning

Creating a following is not just about making the right idea, with the right technique, at the right moment, on the right social media, once. Building a following is about consistency over time. A clear example is when today you share one piece you consider perfect and you get very poor feedback, nobody gives a damn. Some other day, you make a very shoddy sketch, and everyone loves it, but that last one is not common. It is the total of what you consider "failures" and "wins" that over time will build a great number of people following your creations.

With that being said, List the topics you addressed in the previous step and think about how, when, and where you will share them based on your schedule. With one goal in mind: deliver. It's important to know the limitations of your schedule so you can plan the best way to balance it and still meet your goal. The next point is also key to keep you consistent over time; remember, this is a long-term game.

Execution

Choose a technique that allows you to make your original idea understandable and then proceed to add extra yet unnecessary information. For instance, make line art your priority and try to tell what you want to tell with lines instead of trying to perfectly cover every aspect of a complex composition. Why? Most likely, you don't need that amount of information. Remember, it's important to keep it simple yet effective in order not to burn out and try again soon.

We often think having more realistically rendered pictures will increase reaction, and this is true to some degree, but striving for a high following only doing that will not allow you to develop into ideas that don't rely on visual quality. Compelling ideas you can create without relying 100% on a reference, therefore meeting some specific needs every artist has - in other words, making people follow you for your ideas, not your copy/paste skills.

This does not mean you should not share your studies. I've done plenty, and they work; people love to see that. But keep in mind your plan for some pieces in which the concept plays a more important role than realistic render based on a reference. That way, you can slowly develop and understand which of your ideas relate to people and which ones don't.

Analysis

Choose a measurement method, depending on the social media where you share your art, a number that helps you compare one piece with another, and ask yourself why this happened? Eventually, this becomes a very intuitive process as you need to assume different things, but it's a very useful way to gain experience with a social media audience.

Remember, it's normal not to get a high amount of feedback when testing. This does not mean your art is bad; it could mean many other things, like limited visibility or the context of the piece. That's why it's important to try different ideas and executions and see which one gets more traction.

The point of analysis is to increase awareness over which pieces done by you get a reaction out of people. Then it's your work to mix what you consider worked in the past into the pieces of the future. This constant production and analysis is one of the things that helped me come up with the concepts and executions I currently do, what we call "experience".

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Conclusion

Like I said, building a following is more of a consistency game than anything else. Think about what from all the things you enjoy which ones are highly popular, list them, and from your schedule, find spots where you would be able to sit and deliver. Choose a technique that allows you to deliver but also try different things when you have some extra time. This exploration and consistency will help you raise your awareness into knowing what triggers people and what doesn't, by analyzing with whatever your measurement method is.

I'd like to tell you to try a new idea every day, like the 30-minute sketch challenge we have daily in our Discord group, but unfortunately, not all of us have the same schedule; some artists are pretty busy. But if you are interested in more specific feedback from me based on your case, please get in touch here in the DMs or via Discord in any of the channels. I'll be happy to help!

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