Deviant Art, It Is I, Your Maker!

Deviant Art is an online community I'm an active member in. It's a community based on the expression of creative ideas and artwork, and the ability to share these with a large community of likeminded artists and comment on others. There are many ways one can interact on DeviantArt, depending on what your objectives are. You can submit your own work for others to comment and constructively criticize, you can browse other's submissions and comment on their idnividual artwork. By having each member allocated their own main page, you can also make general comments and talk with a person about their overall style. Further communication can be made through the forums, and by posting journal works for people to read. An integrated messaging system allows for the notification of members when they receive a comment on their work, and notification of when other people have submitted new 'deviations' (e.g. artwork). By adding another artist to your favourite list (by 'devwatching' them) you can easily keep track with newly submitted artwork and journal posts. In turn others can add you to their list, to see when you post new images.

Now, I don't really see myself as a full-fledged 'artist'. I can't say many of my uploads on DeviantArt are really deserving of the title 'piece of art'. But that's not what I use DA for. You don't have to be amazingly talented at something to use DeviantArt, because one of the reason for using it is to improve or to find what you are good at. Even if you are drawing stick figures, or you have only taken photos out your bedroom window, you can still use DeviantArt. There are lots of people on it that are simply art lovers and just browse other poeples pages and look at their images and comment. And there are some who are just starting out with their artwork, and look forward to other's comments. Here's one of my images...wahoo!!!

The format of the submitted artwork is heavily separated into categories, which means the upload process takes a lot longer then normal. Types of artwork that you can upload range from digital imagery, to traditional photography, to artist nudes and poetry. The one thing I think is missing in deviantart is a section for audio and video artwork, although they do allow the submission of flash animations. This is probably because they host all the submissions on their own servers and audio and video would severely tax their servers.

That leads onto the topic of subscriptions. One of the most important functions of DeviantArt is that for an artwork sharing and commenting community its free. The deviantarts aren't subscribers, because you can do almost everything with a non-subscription membership. It is only when you begin to think commercially or wanting of the other functions (such as shoutbox and the ability to start posts) that you have to pay for anything. To convert your imagery into prints you have to buy a separate Prints Account, where you can have DeviantArt organize that sale of prints of your artwork.

Different from this prints account is paying for a subscription. By paying for a subscription (not that much, really) you get added features such as no ads (although the non-sub adds aren't that bad. You also get additional message center features such as the ability to have a personal calendar, shoutbox, polls, forum and shoutboard. Subscribing for a year is about $40 Australian Bucks.

Overall it's a cool place to find like-minded people (like many online communities) and sometimes find some really cool works of art... Mature warning on this painting...

So go and check out my page http://existentialistno09.deviantart.com and maybe you'll want to start one of your own!

Main DeviantArt Page: http://www.deviantart.com