Ceryl the Pretty

(Guillaume Rondelet, 1554)

apologies to all the people who are going to wake up to me posting unhinged walls of text in 2-3 hours

i woke up at some odd hour in the AM with a lot of undirected brain energy and nowhere to spend it so im just putting words on this website and hoping maybe some of them make sense

You've described the thing that people come to this web page for. We want the weird unhinged cool walls of text. If I wanted to read people cosplaying as normal I'd be on LinkedIn

A sentiment I see a lot from artists (of all stripes, but in this post I'm talking primarily about illustrators) both on and off Cohost is the desire for people to leave comments when they post art, and feeling disappointed when their work gets Likes or Shares but no comments. This is extremely understandable and not a bad thing to want:

• Creating art is hard, requiring a lot of thought and time and focus and energy, and comments have an order of magnitude more impact on making a piece of art feel "worth" the work you put into it
• It's nice to feel like the art you create inspires conversations and thoughtful reactions!
• A lot of platforms factor comments into a post's algorithmic visibility, so more comments can often have a direct correlation to a piece performing well
• On Cohost specifically, comments are the single enduring data point that reflects how much attention a post received. It's effectively impossible to quantify how many likes or shares were received by a post that's more than a week old, but comments are forever

I definitely don't want to come across like I'm scolding artists for wanting comments on the art they post. I love art and artists and I also wish that commenting on artwork was more common! I love talking with people about art, just ask my friends who I am constantly, incessantly sending different pieces of art to at all hours. The thought I'd like any artists who see this to entertain is this:

What are you doing to help people comment on your art?

I'm not saying it's your fault people don't leave comments. That's absolutely not it. I'm saying: it can be difficult for someone who likes your art to feel like their comment is welcome, interesting, or valuable. It takes a lot more brain power to write and post even a short comment than it does to hit the like or share buttons, and when someone might be scrolling past dozens or even hundreds of pieces of art in a day, leaving comments on everything just isn't feasible. So, what can be done to make your art be the thing that someone wants to comment on, all other things being equal?

Sometimes, the art speaks for itself, and people will comment on that. But it's important to remember that most of the people looking at your work are not artists, and even for artists there's only so much that can be said about a piece. For example, there are artists whose use of color I adore, but how many times can I say "I love your colors!" in the comments before it starts to sound insincere? At a certain point, isn't it a given that I love their coloring? Do I really want my identity in the eyes of this artist I admire to be "the color freak"?

(An exception here, I think, is narrative art. Anecdotally, I've observed that comics - even single panels - tend to do much better comments-wise than other forms of visual art. I think this has to do with people forming attachments to characters - things are often happening in narrative art that people can comment on, and people can often use the things that are happening in a piece of narrative art as something to riff on.)

Personally, I think that if you want people to comment on your art posts, one thing to try is turning your caption into a prompt. And I don't just mean something general, like "If you like this, leave a comment!" That doesn't give a potential commenter anything to go off of and also makes people feel like they're being pressured to prop up your self-esteem, which, frankly, is Engagement Poison. Instead, try to think of something to say that might draw someone into a conversation that's relevant to the piece you posted:

• Say something about the piece itself. Is there something you're especially proud of? Was there anything you struggled with? Did you try something new this time? Make sure you invite a response! "This was my first time rendering hair like this, but I think it turned out well - what do you think?"
• Ask the viewer to place themselves in the piece. We've all seen those accounts on Twitter that will post a picture of a big monster in a city and ask "What would you do in this situation?" Those posts get TONS of comments, both from people taking the prompt seriously and from people riffing, because it's FUN to play make-believe. You can ask almost anything: how would you spend an afternoon with this character? What would you bring on a picnic to this location? How would you do in the driver's seat of this vehicle?
• Talk about, like, ANYTHING. Make small talk. Were you listening to a song on repeat while you worked on the piece? Have you binged any series recently? Has the weather been bad where you live? Volunteering information about yourself is a good way to get people to volunteer information about themselves, it's how people are wired. And you can link it back to the art you're posting: "The weather's been so sunny here, it was really hard staying indoors to work on this! How's the weather been for you?"

"This all sounds kind of parasocial."

I mean, yeah. That's what we're doing here, isn't it? If you want people leaving comments, the thing you want is for people to make a tangible social investment in your work. Some people are lucky in that their work naturally starts conversations, or they're popular enough that they're guaranteed a certain amount of commenters no matter what they post. The rest of us have to make the most of whatever we can in order to make our audiences comfortable enough to publicly invest themselves in what we create. If you'd prefer to keep doing the things you've always been doing and then silently (or vocally) resenting your audience when they don't behave exactly as you want them to, you can go ahead. But, like, give it some thought!

Enjoy!