Navarre by Elicia Donze. Drawn in PS. Please do not remove captions.
[Caption: A realistic digital painting of Navarre from Ladyhawke. Portrait is from waist up. Navarre is sitting with a sword across his lap. He’s wearing a black doublet and black leather gauntlets. The background is warm peachy yellow.]
Fan artists, we have the largest reach among the youngest voting bracket of all artists on social media. Young people online who’ve just become old enough to vote see our art more than they see any other kind of art.
It would be rad if we used our reach to get young people to register to vote.
So I propose the #artforthevote tag. Fan artists, put the message in the art itself or include it in your caption when you post your next piece. Include a link to https://vote.gov/ and tag your art #artforthevote.
Thanks, anon! Very kind of you. It looks like eliciadonze’s ask box is closed, so I will tag them here, @eliciadonze and hope that they see this post with your message!
♥♥♥
You can also email them; a screencap of their header with their email address is below the cut. I have emailed them in the past and not received a reply, so I don’t know how often they check it or if they reply to messages, so I will not be emailing them your message.
I don’t normally do this, sorry for the interruption, this is Not VC related.
One of the best artists I’ve ever seen, @eliciadonze, is getting an enormous amount of hate, both on anon and off. They have tried to block the hate but it is relentless (they posted a few examples, see under the cut). It seems like it has escalated recently.
The best response to this right now is to drown out the hate in positivity, please check out their archive and like/reblog their beautiful art! I’ll be doing that momentarily. Or, send them kind messages. Please do not attempt to give advice. Kind words are a salve to help this artist heal from the cruelty of these anons.
(If the artist wants me to revise/delete this post, I will do so. I just felt that I might try to help by rallying some positivity).
Warning, these messages are very disgusting and cruel. I include them bc the artist had posted them so that we could see just a tiny sample of what they get on a REGULAR basis. I’m not doing this bc the artist is talented (they ARE!), but because there is absolutely NO REASON EVER to send this kind of vitriol.
If you make fanart, you can treat it like real art. Learn to talk about it. Learn how to talk about your work and the choices you make. Respect what you make and what others are making. So much of fanart is tangled up in the internalized misogyny within fandom communities—it’s hard to see yourself or others as the artist you actually are if you can’t respect the art and why it matters. Fandom communities are very strong and very passionate, and we are lucky to have them. Other art communities don’t even come close to that.
And with art, you either have to be what they want or change their minds about what they want.
So. I think we do both. We can treat the act of fan creation with the respect it deserves because of what it is: a powerful, subversive reclaiming of your right to see yourself in stories and to belong to a mythology that has been taken from you.
And we can use that to change minds. Fandom can and has been a great force for change in how stories get told, and social media is the best vehicle there is, and I think raising ourselves up to a level where we treat our art and others’ art with the respect we’d treat more accepted art is the most powerful thing we can do (or continue to do, for the many who are) to push through barriers.
I-want-my-IWTV 