Ok so I just want to say that I've been posting my art on Esix for months now, everytime I would upload something new it would always tend to do decent in my eyes, weather it would be a small amount of upvotes and a considerable amount of favorites, or maybe I would get lucky and I would have a post reach hundreds of upvotes and likes.

For example these pieces would always get a considerable amount of positive attention:

https://e621.net/posts/3605308?q=synrize
https://e621.net/posts/3857509?q=synrize
https://e621.net/posts/3827488?q=synrize

Yet my most recent art that I posted has gotten either a negative or neutral reaction? I am confused, why did these pieces fail while the latter ones succeeded? It just seems as if I was doing decent and all of a sudden there was some sort of crash.
Does my art all of a sudden just not meet the minimum quality threshold or what??
I'm failing too see what went wrong and if anyone could try and help me reach some sort of conclusion, it would very much appreciated.

Oh and also keep in mind, on Newgrounds the same submissions have each reached a 4.5 star rating average. Though the ratings are hidden until one last person adds their vote in for each piece.

And my most recent posts here are the ones I'm talking about:

https://e621.net/posts/3908191?q=synrize
https://e621.net/posts/3908209?q=synrize
https://e621.net/posts/3908234?q=synrize

please help me in someway.

verkonos said:
And my most recent posts here are the ones I'm talking about:

https://e621.net/posts/3908191?q=synrize
https://e621.net/posts/3908209?q=synrize
https://e621.net/posts/3908234?q=synrize

please help me in someway.

I would guess it's because they're FNAF animatronics and that's a more niche interest. Sorry though, always sucks when this happens :/

Id say proportions and colors are to blame, the latest one is the "worst". It's all just one big blob, it's hard to say which part of the body is which.
They aren't bad, just not great. You're doing ok, just keep practicing and try not to think about it too much.

cloudpie said:
I would guess it's because they're FNAF animatronics and that's a more niche interest. Sorry though, always sucks when this happens :/

And I thought some people would know how to use the blacklist by now :(

aobird said:
Id say proportions and colors are to blame, the latest one is the "worst". It's all just one big blob, it's hard to say which part of the body is which.
They aren't bad, just not great. You're doing ok, just keep practicing and try not to think about it too much.

Oh my God, thank you. I'm really happy that someone finally said something about my work that was actually critical for once though, and I thank you for that, alot.

One thing I did have to ask about though was the proportions, is there anyway for you to elaborate on what you mean by improving them? I never thought that would be something in particular to look at.

As for the colors I did take direct samples from the original authors works for my coloring so that's probably what resulted in a disconnect.

Other than that thank you so much for pointing all that out!

for me it's the mouth, i can't pinpoint it but the opening feels a bit too wide and she has almost a glasgow smile vibe

post #3908209

i'd say this is more of a character design problem than it is a technical artistry problem. your art featuring other characters is pretty normal looking and appealing, including the mouths which end closer to the center

The FNAF ones are good, but as pointed out the colors make them hard to read, you could try using saturated colors more selectively and keep most other things muted.

Definitely worth watching a video on practical color theory, this one is what improved my color choice a lot when I was doing graphic design and 3D stuff.

Also the anatomy on the bj pic of the FNAF one is kind of weird: the guy appears to be circumcised, so the head color should be redder than the shaft color (like lip/inside of mouth compared to the rest of the face).

Also you might have noticed that a lot of people Fav but don't upvote, so even your "bad" posts are doing pretty well. Actually bad posts have an overall negative vote count, and generally anything beyond a dozen upvotes is highly dependant on quality with the actual content having a slight effect on that (there are multiple pages of FNAF posts that have 1000+ upvotes, so there is an audience, it's just a matter of how much time and effort is worth putting into your art for internet points)

tl;dr, I think they're alright (much better than my own illustration skills) and the content is not what's keeping me from upvoting, but moreso that they're below the quality threshold at which I would personally upvote. Definitely don't shy away from drawing what you want to draw, your integrity as an artist is worth more than upvotes on some random website.

dripen_arn said:
for me it's the mouth, i can't pinpoint it but the opening feels a bit too wide and she has almost a glasgow smile vibe

post #3908209

i'd say this is more of a character design problem than it is a technical artistry problem. your art featuring other characters is pretty normal looking and appealing, including the mouths which end closer to the center

Thanks for letting me know, looking back now I think that making the mouth less robotic probably would've been a much better approach, anyways thank you so much for your input.

magikarp said:
The FNAF ones are good, but as pointed out the colors make them hard to read, you could try using saturated colors more selectively and keep most other things muted.

Definitely worth watching a video on practical color theory, this one is what improved my color choice a lot when I was doing graphic design and 3D stuff.

Also the anatomy on the bj pic of the FNAF one is kind of weird: the guy appears to be circumcised, so the head color should be redder than the shaft color (like lip/inside of mouth compared to the rest of the face).

Also you might have noticed that a lot of people Fav but don't upvote, so even your "bad" posts are doing pretty well. Actually bad posts have an overall negative vote count, and generally anything beyond a dozen upvotes is highly dependant on quality with the actual content having a slight effect on that (there are multiple pages of FNAF posts that have 1000+ upvotes, so there is an audience, it's just a matter of how much time and effort is worth putting into your art for internet points)

tl;dr, I think they're alright (much better than my own illustration skills) and the content is not what's keeping me from upvoting, but moreso that they're below the quality threshold at which I would personally upvote. Definitely don't shy away from drawing what you want to draw, your integrity as an artist is worth more than upvotes on some random website.

Thank you for the reply, the thoughtful words you used really help set things in the right direction for me, and I will check out the color theory video you sent, I really hope it ends up helping me greatly in my hobby, again thank you so much!

TBH I think sorting out your values, especially, designing good shadow shapes, will get you further than color theory based on what I see here.
This image shows the kind of general thing I mean.

Shadows are super important and can make your composition much stronger.

One thing that bugs me about post #3827488 is how the shark girl's right thigh looks abnormally large and awkwardly far forward compared to her left thigh.

I think what stands out to me the most at a first glance, is the eyes, maybe you could experiment different ways of drawing the eyeballs. The shape of the eyes are good though!

And looking at the last example, post #3908234 the thing that stands out to me is, like others may have mentioned, the "difficulty in telling who is who", I recommend looking into studying about silhouettes if you haven't already.
Even while writing this, I thought it was a POV of a male fucking her, but took my a while to notice the male is behind her instead.

Additionally, the teeth, lips, and the cheek thing weirds me out, not because they're an animatronic detail, but because a perfectly frontal perspective usually looks weird for me. The way they're presented makes it hard to distinguish them between a mechanical detail, or a weird organic cheek with bad makeup. Maybe it could have been fixed if you added more details to it, like a screw.

Should her head be slightest turned to the side would improve it on my book as well.

As for the teeth, maybe you could try giving them also more detail? On the last one, the character has a bunny buckteeth, but also has other teeth that goes all the way back in the mouth. It feels like a detail discrepancy, I would either give them the bunny teeth, or only the normal teeth. Or if determined enough, give them the buckteeth, but also detail the individual other teeth, to keep detail consistent.

And the lips... I just don't like exagerated lips on animal looking creatures I guess, personal preference :p

All these imperfections bundled together gives the artwork mentioned a "creepy feeling", which might explain the negative reception.

Your posts with scores above one hundred are animations, nothing random or lucky there. Animations almost always accrue higher scores and more favorites than pictures.

verkonos said:
Oh my God, thank you. I'm really happy that someone finally said something about my work that was actually critical for once though, and I thank you for that, alot.

One thing I did have to ask about though was the proportions, is there anyway for you to elaborate on what you mean by improving them? I never thought that would be something in particular to look at.

As for the colors I did take direct samples from the original authors works for my coloring so that's probably what resulted in a disconnect.

Other than that thank you so much for pointing all that out!

You don't appear to be going for the stylized style so the general proportions should apply. A single thigh should not be thicker and/or longer than the torso, pussy should not be larger than the boob and so on.
Get a doll (or 3D model) that can have it joins rotated that way you make a figure you want to draw as a help. Before you intuitively know how to do it, you have to practice by observing or calculating the ratio of different body parts, first on flat 2d plane then later with the included depth of field.

Blacklist doesn’t always work when the uploader forgot to add proper tags and people just downvote because they could

watchdog22 said:
Blacklist doesn’t always work when the uploader forgot to add proper tags and people just downvote because they could

imo, this isn't about blacklisting, it's just a matter of having realistic expectations for upvotes. They still got 20+ favs on their less popular posts and an at-least neutral score despite having some downvotes, so I'd say that their posts are performing well for the quality, the content I don't think is actually relevant considering how popular FNAF is in the furry community and the posts being normal in other aspects too.

I dislike this middle ground between rigid/mechanical and pliable/biological surfaces. There's some uncanny valley-thing going on, that reads like some WW1 prosthesis at a glance. You've got pretty good artistic fundamentals, so I would suggest looking up art with purely mechanical characters that you find appealing and essentially translating them into a faux fur-covered animatronic look if that's your thing. Footage of IRL animatronic fursuit heads could also be a great source of inspiration.

Facial expressions are kinda dead, anatomy is very broken, and the character face is not appealing or pleasing to see imo.