I've been around for a while, and it really just sunk in today how amazing the art has gotten. I remember when Dr. Comet and Jeremy Bernal/Sexyfur were the pinnacle of online art, but things really have exploded. It's pretty great!

Old news, but yeah. Looking at posts on this site, it feels like it might have been a sudden change about a decade ago. However, I don't recall noticing anything a decade ago. I only see it in hindsight.

Though, I do have a strange sense of nostalgia for the days when all feral pokemon porn was in a toony/oekaki artstyle, as opposed to the more highly detailed artstyles commonplace in modern day. Of course, toony pokemon porn artists still do exist in modern day. Gau_(artist) is probably my favorite artist.

The rise of digital art and it being more accessible as the years go by is a direct contributor of the quality improving. And when the technology evolves, so does the art. Traditional art can be just as good but it is often tedious due to having to scan, using specific physical tools and utensils, etc.

I like to compare it to screen resolutions. Back in the day, we thought 720p was impressive and “full HD”. Nowadays, 4K is the norm and 8K is slowly emerging from around the corner.

"It's crazy how good digital art has gotten in the last 15-20 years " FTFY :P

Yeah, costs are... way down. Machines are better. Multitouch tablet PCs with millions of pixels and large screens are good enough to do a lot of things on. Even a tablet PC has decent enough GPU+CPU to do some kinds of art editing. Although to be fair, I'd be wanting to use one of those apps that turns your tablet PC into a touchpad and mirrored display for a desktop/laptop PC.

It's not merely a technological improvement, because even traditional furry art is better these days. There's more communication between artists, sharing of processes, ability to learn, and availability of creative inspirations than there was even back in 2010. For traditional art in particular, it may be that the artists who use it over or alongside digital art are doing so out of a familiarity or comfort with the medium, instead of doing it because they can't afford a tablet. Better scanners and ability to do clean up/enhancements don't hurt either.

I consider pe-2010 the "dark ages" of furry art. No exposure, very niche, far less interconnected, many artists seemed solitary or unknown.

There's a lot of potential reasons for the perceived art improvement:

• more exposure means more furries and normalizing the fandom means more demand for furry art means more furry artists
• also, as far as I know, furry commissioners haven't stopped being "rich" and furry artists haven't stopped being financially unstable, relatively speaking
• tremendously more and popular furry-leaning media (movies and game characters)
• a lot more pure furry media (think Beastars as opposed to Lion King)
• more people with access to technology (and art devices and programs as others mentioned)
• more technologically literal people
• technological literacy gained much earlier in life
• more accessible mid-tier in art progression between "doodles at school" and "get an art degree"/"became a professional artist"
• some artists just have had a decade of experience and growth now lol
• having many more artists in the fandom means more of them will be talented (more good artists but in same proportion)
• after much iteration among the fandom, we have a much better grasp of which styles and content are appealing and not
• many niches within the fandom have likewise consolidated their identities
• having access to so much good stuff can present the illusion that there's less bad stuff (amount of "good stuff" started overwhelming me back in 2015... no time for worse stuff, needed to raise my standard)
• having so much art over the years that still holds up today can present the illusion that the good stuff is all newer (e.g., an artist has been putting out good stuff since 2017, but you only discovered them recently, thus this trove of good stuff is "new" to you)
• e621's minimum acceptable art quality has literally gone up, and I would say there's more apathy for approving borderline acceptable posts too

abadbird said:
I consider pe-2010 the "dark ages" of furry art. No exposure, very niche, far less interconnected, many artists seemed solitary or unknown.

There's a lot of potential reasons for the perceived art improvement:

• more exposure means more furries and normalizing the fandom means more demand for furry art means more furry artists
• also, as far as I know, furry commissioners haven't stopped being "rich" and furry artists haven't stopped being financially unstable, relatively speaking
• tremendously more and popular furry-leaning media (movies and game characters)
• a lot more pure furry media (think Beastars as opposed to Lion King)
• more people with access to technology (and art devices and programs as others mentioned)
• more technologically literal people
• technological literacy gained much earlier in life
• more accessible mid-tier in art progression between "doodles at school" and "get an art degree"/"became a professional artist"
• some artists just have had a decade of experience and growth now lol
• having many more artists in the fandom means more of them will be talented (more good artists but in same proportion)
• after much iteration among the fandom, we have a much better grasp of which styles and content are appealing and not
• many niches within the fandom have likewise consolidated their identities
• having access to so much good stuff can present the illusion that there's less bad stuff (amount of "good stuff" started overwhelming me back in 2015... no time for worse stuff, needed to raise my standard)
• having so much art over the years that still holds up today can present the illusion that the good stuff is all newer (e.g., an artist has been putting out good stuff since 2017, but you only discovered them recently, thus this trove of good stuff is "new" to you)
• e621's minimum acceptable art quality has literally gone up, and I would say there's more apathy for approving borderline acceptable posts too

Also: World population, but yeah, you mentioned Internet population. :D

It's a numbers game, with extra factors.

Internet use exploded in the West between the 90s and 2008. Rule 34 popped off around 2008 and is now an integral part of coomer culture. Internet use continued to climb, and the rate more than doubled globally. Various online payment options took off in the mid-2010s.

Digital art can't be ignored. The benefits feed into both quantitty and quality.

FA launched in 2005, e621 in 2007. Things were slower in the early 2010s. The upload rate has increased about 500% since I joined.

abadbird said:

• tremendously more and popular furry-leaning media (movies and game characters)
• a lot more pure furry media (think Beastars as opposed to Lion King)

Not sure I buy this one, actually. Of the list of most popular copyright tags, how many would you say are both "pure" furry media and released after 2010? Zootopia is the only obvious candidate near the top. I was surprised at how far down Beastars was. MLP doesn't really count both by technicalities (existed before 2010, are ferals "pure"?) and the fact that the "brony" fandom developed more or less independently of the rest of furdom. How "furry" is Undertale outside of three characters? Do we have to define FNAF as "pure furry media"?

Things don't look much better when you break down Nintendo and Disney by their component implications. (Side gripe: why is "order by tag count" still broken in the implications search?) For Disney, while Zootopia is in first place with nearly 50% of total posts, the next podium positions are all much older: Lilo and Stitch, The Lion King, Goof Troop, Robin Hood, Chip'n'Dale, 101 Dalmatians, and that's just the tags that have more posts than all of Pixar's output put together. With Nintendo it's even bleaker, aided of course by the fact that they've been allergic to new ideas since 2010, although the Zelda sub-tag breath_of_the_wild does have nearly as many posts as Splatoon by itself.

TLDR: The theory that Zootopia single-handedly caused a furry renaissance may be truer than you think.

wat8548 said:
TLDR: The theory that Zootopia single-handedly caused a furry renaissance may be truer than you think.

zootopia order:id_asc

The Zootopia porn wave started in 2015. The site was already growing fast before then, but maybe.

forum #242001
https://furbitron.com/site-e621-all.html @Furbitron

This was pretty useful for looking at tag trends, but it's dead: topic #21926 @PrettyBird

lance_armstrong said:
It's a numbers game, with extra factors.

Internet use exploded in the West between the 90s and 2008. Rule 34 popped off around 2008 and is now an integral part of coomer culture. Internet use continued to climb, and the rate more than doubled globally. Various online payment options took off in the mid-2010s.

Digital art can't be ignored. The benefits feed into both quantitty and quality.

FA launched in 2005, e621 in 2007. Things were slower in the early 2010s. The upload rate has increased about 500% since I joined.

The internet also exploded post-2010, the number of users online skyrocketed from 1.97 billion people in 2010 to 4.95 billion in 2022, that's 3 billion more potential furries. Millennials and Gen Z are more likely to be into the furry fandom or at least, create furry artwork, than generations past.

hungrymaple said:
The internet also exploded post-2010, the number of users online skyrocketed from 1.97 billion people in 2010 to 4.95 billion in 2022, that's 3 billion more potential furries. Millennials and Gen Z are more likely to be into the furry fandom or at least, create furry artwork, than generations past.

LOL, gotta break them national firewalls, though... I blame Pokemon and Rescue Rangers for seeding the interest as children, that lead to aged-up artists doing furry in their 30's. Or something, something. ;)

Like other posters have said, it's a combination of digital art tools being easier to afford than ever, internet storage and bandwidth being more accomodating for sharing artwork/video, and the furry fandom exploding in growth and cultural acceptance since that time. Being a furry fan was *deeply* unpopular in the 80s and 90s, but it found a niche, and the internet fostered a collection of fans who somehow felt the same way. It's now a definite thing, and social media has spread the positive aspects as well as the artwork. Even though Furry is still far from mainstream, it's not career- or social-suicide to be a furry artist or to claim a fursona like it once was.

lance_armstrong said:
The Zootopia porn wave started in 2015. The site was already growing fast before then, but maybe. [...]
https://furbitron.com/site-e621-all.html @Furbitron

Compare that with https://furbitron.com/site-fa-all.html . As you said, FA and e621 launched a couple of years apart, but I think it's interesting that the shape of the curve for both sites is nearly identical.

When I first plotted the data for all the sites, one thing I noticed on some of the smaller sites was a jump in submissions around late May, 2016. It's particularly visible for these four sites - look at the orange line, just before day 150:

https://furbitron.com/site-furiffic-yoy1.html
https://furbitron.com/site-furrynetwork-yoy1.html
https://furbitron.com/site-sofurry-yoy1.html
https://furbitron.com/site-weasyl-yoy1.html

My first thought, without researching it, was that the jump was one of the "let's all ditch FA" movements that comes around from time to time. FA selling out to IMVU spawned one of those, but there have been a few others over the years.

Another critter recently suggested Zootopia as the cause of that jump, so I looked it up. The US theatrical release was on March 4, 2016, and the home video release was on June 7, 2016. So I don't think it quite fits that jump.

From what I remember, Zootopia porn first showed up either here or on FA about a day after the Zootopia trailer came out. It would be amusing, though, if those ~600,000 submissions FurryNetwork got in May-June 2016 were all Zootopia-related. :D

edit: fixed link

As far as the artwork being "good," that's pretty subjective. I see lots of art that I like and appeals to me, both as a fan and as a horndog, and there is plenty of art that is filled with details and technical skill, but the amount of great art—like the kind that could fill a gallery and attract serious attention—is still pretty rare.

I've noticed that while we don't see too many of the laughably terrible pics like we used to in the VCL and LiveJournal days, it's also generally more difficult to make bad art. Yes, this is a bit of a hot take, but hear me out. I mean that the number of art tools and technique out there let you make more undoable mistakes, let you make cleaner and smoother lines, let you craft something much more pleasing to the eye. Every part of a pic is resizable and reshapable and reworkable, so you don't get massive errors of scale or weight or anatomy. There are a countless number of online tutorials and references and ideas for artists now. They can also get feedback on their art a lot quicker, so they can improve their work faster and put out fewer duds. There's also a wide number of art and photo filters that can mask flaws or amateurish work through a number of visual effects and blurs and distortions, thus sending the illusion that the art is better because it's so stylish. There's of course the MS Paint level troll art out there, but for a new artist getting into the game, it's a lot easier to level up their skills and quality, in a shorter amount of time, to reach an acceptable level of quality than it used to be.