helo12 wrote:Well I'm relatively new here so my analysis might not count for much, but I think people being upset has more to do with the manor in which your work accelerates up the rankings rather than you as an artist.
While it is totally legal and great to campaign your work, it is disheartening to others when yours surpasses theirs within a few hours and I think this leads to the conspiracy/secret society thoughts?
Take your Invictus design from last week for example, in all honesty it made for a bad shirt (I'm not speaking about you as an artist). That being said, it somehow shot up the rankings.
Like I said earlier, it's good to campaign, but I think the point of getting a vote shouldn't just be out of support for knowing an artist. A vote should signify that irregardless of the relationship to an artist, they would genuinely buy and wear the shirt if they were to see it in a store. For all I know, that is the case, I just believe that's what the beef is about.
So I'm not trying to make enemies or insult you or anything, I'm just offering my perspective on what has seemed to be brewing since I've been around. I think you have talent so I hope you don't take offense.
I get that. Part of the thing is, I submit usually 2-4 shirts a week, and most never make it halfway up the rankings. The 'invictus' shirt was one I'd already designed a month or two ago, and I have a group of friends (and a few family members) who have a lot of sentiment tied up in that poem. I actually 'lobbied' harder with that one - sending it out to a group of another 20-30 folks, mostly from my college days, because I knew they'd like it and probably buy one if it printed. (And FWIW, I wish that derby had come a few weeks later, as I was trying to figure a way to halftone it to use less ink.)
When I design shirts that have references to fantasy works (LotR, especially), I have another group I send a message to. (I used to sell thousands of LotR trading cards, and I've still got customer lists and a long list of friends that are LotR fans - plus I still make designs for TheOneRing.net)
This week, I sent a link to my Dark Tower shirt to a small group of friends that are Stephen King fans. A lot of good that has done me, in terms of vote total, you can probably see.
No insult taken, and I understand. I was quite frustrated when I first started designing here a year or so ago, until I started paying attention to what the more successful artists were doing to promote their work (in Facebook and elsewhere). Most of them are professional (or semi-professional) artists with folks that follow their artwork. In my case, I am a Professional Engineer (a registered PE, actually, though I've not had to use my registration for years), with a large network of friends and family who are somewhat nerdy/geeky like me, so that's who I leverage.
Sometimes, I test designs on a few of them before ever submitting them, and if I get a thumbs down, I don't submit the design. In the case of the Pi Rho Delta one, I got a number of thumbs down, but submitted it anyway (as it was a college joke fraternity we used to talk about, and sentiment overrode good sense).
So, I do get what you're saying. I just don't know how to best act on it, other than to make sure that the groups I target for support are ones that would actually buy the shirt.
Thanks again, and no offense taken.
