I appreciate a critique. I want to be a better artist. If someone is right, they are right.

Sometimes the critiques are just way off.

I remember someone going on about how my figure work on Orbiter was over-rendered. And I thought, whoa, there is someone who hasn’t a clue what they are saying because that works was very simply rendered. Flat blacks and simple line. No rendering. So, I completely dismissed their comment.

It would be correct to criticize some of the early A Distant Soil figure work as over-rendered.

I originally made the art fairly simple, because I intended it for color. Later I redid the art for black and white and added a lot of hatching. And I went overboard. It shows how insecure I was about my drawing.

I think it’s great that people take the time to let me know what they think. They could just ignore it. Their time is as valuable as mine.

That said, you have to be able to filter. If someone says they hate my work because it’s too full of pretty people and it’s in the 1980’s, and there are gay people in it, well, that’s not a useful critique. It’s like complaining that an 1830 romance novel has too many pretty people in it, and it’s too old fashioned. Dude, go read something else.

But storytelling points, and grammar, and character motivation, that I can use. If I can’t go back and redo what I have done, I can learn from the mistakes.

An amateur/fan work will get a technical critique like, oh, a misplaced apostrophe, and for the next week the topic will be WAAAAHH YOUR ALL MEEEENIES IM LEAVING THE INTERNET FOREVER!!!!11!

Mistakes will be made, that’s kind of a given. What you do about them and how you respond to them is the dividing line.

By the way, I say I appreciate the critiques, and I mean it. There may not be a whole lot I can do about the old stuff, but you never know when it will help the new stuff.

THANK YOU!

Yeah, she overlaps all right… oh, wait XD

(I know, fish in a barrel… but someone had to say it, so may as well be me)