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fanart_recs2010-10-06 11:26 pm
ratcreature) wrote in fanart_recs2010-10-06 11:26 pm
Entry tags:
Questions & Answers
A few people have asked further questions in the sign-up post's comments, and I thought it might be a good idea to have a post collecting these for reference without making the basic intro & rules post overly long and detailed.
1. Can I sign up for a rec theme/topic that is not a fandom?
No. The sign-up for reccing and the categorization of the recs is organized by fandom, with each reccer being in charge of the recs for the fandom they picked during the month they signed up for, and that simple model wouldn't really work anymore if a single reccer wanted some other criterion to pick their recs, and recced say AU art or a mix of Big Bang art or some other topic across fandoms. So you have to pick a fandom for a month.
However unlike Crack Van for example, this rec community is not explicitly dedicated to introduce people to new fandoms, so the fanart you rec doesn't necessarily have to be a balanced/representative selection of art across your fandom. So if a genre or style is a particular favorite of yours, you could just rec that kind of fanart in your single-fandom recs.
2. Can I rec crossover art?
Yes, as long as one of the fandoms is the one you signed up for, you can rec crossover fanart like any other genre. In this particular case the rec should be tagged with both (or all) fandoms though, not just the one you are reccing.
3. What exactly counts as a single "fandom" to sign up for?
Fandoms are not pre-defined for sign-up in this comm. In the case of more complicated canon sources you can sign up for wider or narrower sections of your fandom, though later tagging of the recs may be adjusted if future reccers get more specific or more general. For example somebody could sign up for DC Comics in general, and rec across all comic title families, and later another reccer might sign up just for Batverse recs, then some of the earlier DC Comics recs may get an additional Batverse tag later on if the more specific tag applies.
However as a rule of thumbfanart_recs follows conventions within the fandoms, on whether they consider themselves a separate fandom. For example Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are widely considered two fandoms among their fans, even though both belong to the Stargate franchise. Fandom distinctions as made in popular archives such as fanfiction.net or AO3 can be a good indicator of these conventions when trying to decide under which fandom label to sign up for recs.
4. How exactly do you draw the lines for what counts as "fanart" for this comm?
I tried to cover this in the "What can I rec?" question of the rules, but as always there are tricky grey areas, and standards between fandoms of what is considered as "fanart" might vary as well. So if in doubt you can assume that this comm does not intend to be overly dogmatic about what constitutes "fanart".
First, what you cannot rec is fanfic, fanpoetry, vids, fanfilms, icons, picture macros, costume designs, or fannish music/audio productions (filks, fan mixes, podfic, or audiofic sound collages).
You can rec drawn and painted fanart (whether traditional or digital media), and photomanips, as well three dimensional art such as sculptures, fannish dioramas, and objects like customized action figures (if the customization is a significant change), and fiber art provided that is not costuming (see above) but fiber projects like for example knitted character dolls.
Multimedia works that have a fanart component that would fall under one of the things listed above are also okay to rec, e.g. story illustrations or fancomics with a significant fanart component. So fancomics are okay to rec if they have drawn or manipped art (i.e. if you could rec the art here without the narrative part), but not if a fan arranged screencaps with funny dialog without making the screencaps into digital art.
4.1 And what about photo fancomics?
Fancomics created by creatively posing toys and taking photos are okay to rec in principle too. Though the a rec should not be mostly for the narrative they tell only incidentally in photos, but because they are visually appealing, i.e. the rec should be for the visual art part if it is photo art.
4.2 What about animated fanart?
The "no vids" rule is meant for vids made by cutting the source material to music, not for fanart slideshows or fanart animation. Similarly to how fancomics are not allowed when they are a narrative told with rearranged screencaps but are allowed if they are drawn or manipped.
4.3 What about art created by professionals? Are there any pro vs amateur rules?
The art recced here should not be officially affiliated with the source. So web posted pro art that is done as part of the artist's job rather than as hobby shouldn't be recced. And in general I'd also count it as "work" if it is a paid commission that shows characters they work on officially, even if it isn't official art (such as a comic page). However if someone is a professional artist as their job, but also draws fanart for things they are not associated with as hobby in their free time that would be okay to rec, so there is no strict "amateurs only" rule.
Especially with comics there are plenty of grey areas, and of course people could do official work just briefly then draw the same characters for fun at some later or earlier point in time because they are fans, or other configurations, and there aren't going to be any background checks on the work history of linked artists or the nature of the linked art. Basically if what you rec is what you think of as "fanart" it's fine.
5. Are there any special requirements for the content of my recs? Do I need to talk about technical aspects of the art?
No. You don't need to be technical at all. And the rec doesn't need to be a long indepth review. The "Why this piece is awesome" field in the template is just so you can say why you like that piece of fanart, and why others ought to click and look at it. Whether because it is pretty, or evoked some emotion, or suggested a story or narrative you could glimpse, or because it was funny etc. When people rec fanfic they usually don't talk about technical writing detail either. This is the same principle.
The "medium" field in the template is not intended to be very technical either, but it is mostly because for example some people dislike photomanips or are squicked by them in live action fandoms when they are explicit, so they only want to look at NC-17 art if its drawn, whereas other people don't care for drawn art because they prefer graphics etc. If the artist doesn't say what the medium was and you can't tell (e.g. it's some mix of photomanip and other digital techniques and you don't know what to call it, or you can't tell whether it is digital painting or scanned traditional art or something) you could just skip it or go with a more general term (e.g. "digital art" in the first case, "painting" in the second).
6. Can I rec locked fanart?
Whenever possible you should use public links (not locked, does not require registration on a service to see).
You can rec locked fanart on sites or archives with open membership, i.e. works that require an account on a service to see such as mature works on deviantArt, Tumblr posts that are only visible to logged in Tumblr users, works locked on the AO3 archive or similar situations. To prevent potential frustration, when people click, you should make note in your rec that the link requires being logged into a service.
You should not rec fanart that is privacy locked to be seen only by a specific group of people the artist or a moderator has to approve, such as f-locked journal posts, communities/archives with restricted membership, Tumblr posts that are only visible for followers of the specific Tumblr or similar situations.
ETA (January 2022, collecting some more questions):
7. Can I sign-up for more than one fandom in the same month?
You can't rec two fandoms in the same month, but you can sign up for several months with different fandoms at the same time.
8. Can I sign up for several consecutive months for the same fandom?
You can't reserve the same fandom for consecutive months in advance, but you can express interest to rec longer, and then the sign-up for the second month is only confirmed when the call for reccers for that month is posted, to allow different reccers to snag a slot in popular fandom.
Or you can just sign-up for the second month when you see there's nobody else reccing it the upcoming month in the call for reccers I post roughly a week before the month starts. So it is possible to rec the same fandom several months in a row, but only if nobody else also wants to rec the same fandom.
9. How many recs can I post? Is there a maximum number?
There is a minimum of four recs you have to post as official rule, and a (non-binding) guideline that a reccer should sign up for a second month if they want to post more than eight recs.
1. Can I sign up for a rec theme/topic that is not a fandom?
No. The sign-up for reccing and the categorization of the recs is organized by fandom, with each reccer being in charge of the recs for the fandom they picked during the month they signed up for, and that simple model wouldn't really work anymore if a single reccer wanted some other criterion to pick their recs, and recced say AU art or a mix of Big Bang art or some other topic across fandoms. So you have to pick a fandom for a month.
However unlike Crack Van for example, this rec community is not explicitly dedicated to introduce people to new fandoms, so the fanart you rec doesn't necessarily have to be a balanced/representative selection of art across your fandom. So if a genre or style is a particular favorite of yours, you could just rec that kind of fanart in your single-fandom recs.
2. Can I rec crossover art?
Yes, as long as one of the fandoms is the one you signed up for, you can rec crossover fanart like any other genre. In this particular case the rec should be tagged with both (or all) fandoms though, not just the one you are reccing.
3. What exactly counts as a single "fandom" to sign up for?
Fandoms are not pre-defined for sign-up in this comm. In the case of more complicated canon sources you can sign up for wider or narrower sections of your fandom, though later tagging of the recs may be adjusted if future reccers get more specific or more general. For example somebody could sign up for DC Comics in general, and rec across all comic title families, and later another reccer might sign up just for Batverse recs, then some of the earlier DC Comics recs may get an additional Batverse tag later on if the more specific tag applies.
However as a rule of thumb
fanart_recs follows conventions within the fandoms, on whether they consider themselves a separate fandom. For example Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are widely considered two fandoms among their fans, even though both belong to the Stargate franchise. Fandom distinctions as made in popular archives such as fanfiction.net or AO3 can be a good indicator of these conventions when trying to decide under which fandom label to sign up for recs.4. How exactly do you draw the lines for what counts as "fanart" for this comm?
I tried to cover this in the "What can I rec?" question of the rules, but as always there are tricky grey areas, and standards between fandoms of what is considered as "fanart" might vary as well. So if in doubt you can assume that this comm does not intend to be overly dogmatic about what constitutes "fanart".
First, what you cannot rec is fanfic, fanpoetry, vids, fanfilms, icons, picture macros, costume designs, or fannish music/audio productions (filks, fan mixes, podfic, or audiofic sound collages).
You can rec drawn and painted fanart (whether traditional or digital media), and photomanips, as well three dimensional art such as sculptures, fannish dioramas, and objects like customized action figures (if the customization is a significant change), and fiber art provided that is not costuming (see above) but fiber projects like for example knitted character dolls.
Multimedia works that have a fanart component that would fall under one of the things listed above are also okay to rec, e.g. story illustrations or fancomics with a significant fanart component. So fancomics are okay to rec if they have drawn or manipped art (i.e. if you could rec the art here without the narrative part), but not if a fan arranged screencaps with funny dialog without making the screencaps into digital art.
4.1 And what about photo fancomics?
Fancomics created by creatively posing toys and taking photos are okay to rec in principle too. Though the a rec should not be mostly for the narrative they tell only incidentally in photos, but because they are visually appealing, i.e. the rec should be for the visual art part if it is photo art.
4.2 What about animated fanart?
The "no vids" rule is meant for vids made by cutting the source material to music, not for fanart slideshows or fanart animation. Similarly to how fancomics are not allowed when they are a narrative told with rearranged screencaps but are allowed if they are drawn or manipped.
4.3 What about art created by professionals? Are there any pro vs amateur rules?
The art recced here should not be officially affiliated with the source. So web posted pro art that is done as part of the artist's job rather than as hobby shouldn't be recced. And in general I'd also count it as "work" if it is a paid commission that shows characters they work on officially, even if it isn't official art (such as a comic page). However if someone is a professional artist as their job, but also draws fanart for things they are not associated with as hobby in their free time that would be okay to rec, so there is no strict "amateurs only" rule.
Especially with comics there are plenty of grey areas, and of course people could do official work just briefly then draw the same characters for fun at some later or earlier point in time because they are fans, or other configurations, and there aren't going to be any background checks on the work history of linked artists or the nature of the linked art. Basically if what you rec is what you think of as "fanart" it's fine.
5. Are there any special requirements for the content of my recs? Do I need to talk about technical aspects of the art?
No. You don't need to be technical at all. And the rec doesn't need to be a long indepth review. The "Why this piece is awesome" field in the template is just so you can say why you like that piece of fanart, and why others ought to click and look at it. Whether because it is pretty, or evoked some emotion, or suggested a story or narrative you could glimpse, or because it was funny etc. When people rec fanfic they usually don't talk about technical writing detail either. This is the same principle.
The "medium" field in the template is not intended to be very technical either, but it is mostly because for example some people dislike photomanips or are squicked by them in live action fandoms when they are explicit, so they only want to look at NC-17 art if its drawn, whereas other people don't care for drawn art because they prefer graphics etc. If the artist doesn't say what the medium was and you can't tell (e.g. it's some mix of photomanip and other digital techniques and you don't know what to call it, or you can't tell whether it is digital painting or scanned traditional art or something) you could just skip it or go with a more general term (e.g. "digital art" in the first case, "painting" in the second).
6. Can I rec locked fanart?
Whenever possible you should use public links (not locked, does not require registration on a service to see).
You can rec locked fanart on sites or archives with open membership, i.e. works that require an account on a service to see such as mature works on deviantArt, Tumblr posts that are only visible to logged in Tumblr users, works locked on the AO3 archive or similar situations. To prevent potential frustration, when people click, you should make note in your rec that the link requires being logged into a service.
You should not rec fanart that is privacy locked to be seen only by a specific group of people the artist or a moderator has to approve, such as f-locked journal posts, communities/archives with restricted membership, Tumblr posts that are only visible for followers of the specific Tumblr or similar situations.
ETA (January 2022, collecting some more questions):
7. Can I sign-up for more than one fandom in the same month?
You can't rec two fandoms in the same month, but you can sign up for several months with different fandoms at the same time.
8. Can I sign up for several consecutive months for the same fandom?
You can't reserve the same fandom for consecutive months in advance, but you can express interest to rec longer, and then the sign-up for the second month is only confirmed when the call for reccers for that month is posted, to allow different reccers to snag a slot in popular fandom.
Or you can just sign-up for the second month when you see there's nobody else reccing it the upcoming month in the call for reccers I post roughly a week before the month starts. So it is possible to rec the same fandom several months in a row, but only if nobody else also wants to rec the same fandom.
9. How many recs can I post? Is there a maximum number?
There is a minimum of four recs you have to post as official rule, and a (non-binding) guideline that a reccer should sign up for a second month if they want to post more than eight recs.
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Anyway: when you were taking signups before I did wonder at you putting everyone in November without pushing anyone forward into December. Maybe you need to make the max number of reccers per month a bit lower? After the initial surge you're probably not going to get lots of new people every month, and not everyone will have lots of different fandoms to rec for. I'd be happy to shift mine forward into December if that's helpful.
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I realize that seven or eight reccers each month is not sustainable if the numbers of this comm remain so low in the 40 member/80 subscriber level, but I'm hoping it will grow a bit yet, and than members who like it here attract new ones.
The other is that so far there is no organizational scheme that I'd push people in months, I just listed them for the month they desired. The reccer who signed up for January I put there. I think December is a poor test, because it is holiday season busy with a ton of fannish exchanges, whereas January will just have a lot of exchange artwork posted that can be recced.
Also, there is no reason to expect recs in lots of different fandoms from the same reccer if there is no competition for rec spots in that fandom, i.e. if your fandom has enough art you want to rec for three months in a row, and nobody else wants a go at it, you can rec the same fandom for three months. That is no problem at all.
If you want to switch I'd do that, but right now I'm still hoping the "more traffic and growth" model will pay off, and am not yet *that* worried about December and the months further down the line.
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Fair enough. I'm sure you have more experience with this sort of thing than me.
I better go finish writing my recs then :D
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There'll probably be a post collecting ideas for that soonish.
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As for using non-latin writing systems, when you sign-up for the fandom name it would be better if the fandom name itself was either romanized or translated (depending on what you think more common among international fans of the source), so that I can c&p it without trouble in the sign-up list, and put it into tags easily. Of course some languages I can c&p, but I do not have set up fonts for everything (e.g. some Indian alphabets are a display mess for me), and I'm not sure how well tags deal with non-ascii. But otherwise, anything you can write and DW can encode is fine.
ETA: But if you prefer to translate that is okay too. Basically I think every reccer should follow the convention for names and translations they think fit best for their fandom in an international context.
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First, would it be okay to rec a vid where all the images are fanart? I'm thinking of this http://hdworldcup.marteler-le-ciel.com/2009EWE/accidentswillhappen.html and another similar vid, both of which are among my favourite pieces of fanart ever, but I wasn't sure if they fell foul of your no vids rule.
Second, would it be okay to rec a fanart/fic collaboration? Here I have in mind this piece http://camelot-fleet.dreamwidth.org/49482.html#cutid1 .
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Basically anything that has a major fanart component that could be recced if it was on its own, can also be recced as a larger whole.
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What I mean is, if someone sees cool art without attribution reposted somewhere and wants to rec that here, before doing that the reccer should at least look closely for sigs and whether maybe a google search turns up the artist (for example if someone saw my art reposted somewhere without linking back to me, they could do a google search on my sig and find my page), or depending on how the reposting was done, whether the URL still may contain the original filename and search for that shows another place and such (maybe even asking on a finder comm if their fandom has such infrastructure), and not just going with the first Tumblr repost they saw merely for convenience, without even trying to find the artist.
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Tell you what: I'll include a few of these next time I sign up as a reccer (assuming I really utterly fail to find the artists), but with a big, bolded note attached saying, "Tumblr sucks. Please help me credit this."
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<3!
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Which leads to the second problem that unless an artist hosts their art on a service with a built-in thumbnail embed (like dA), a reccer would need to take art, copy it (obviously to avoid hotlinking issues), and modify it to make a preview. Now most fans probably see this as fair use and akin to quoting a small excerpt from a story as long as the preview is small, but it might run into art control issues.
Also there is a certain risk that with the convenience of just showing the picture, the actual rec part is seen as more superfluous, because you can use the preview to tempt the click. I mean, I realize it is sometimes hard to say why one likes a piece of art the explanation of why it is recced, but I like the written rec part, even if it is just short, and wouldn't want to see it replaced by just showing the art.
Finally there is the practical problem that DW has no image hosting, so each reccer would need to have space to host images, and a little bit down the line you might have lots of ugly broken image links in the rec archive, as can be seen in any community when you go back a few years and people didn't maintain the preview images. I cringe every time.
So I'm not too thrilled with previews in this rec community. But if you think previews would make reccing much more attractive to you, I'd be willing to do a poll about this, briefly laying out the pro and cons of allowing them, and then see how the majority thinks about making previews optional part of the recs. (They'd never be mandatory, because personally I find cropping and resizing a horrible hassle even when posting my own art, so I would not want to bother for a rec.)
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I'll try to remember that in the future!
Suggestion
I noticed that in recent years the majority of new fan-artists are now based on Tumblr rather than LJ/DWs. I just did a quick scroll through the recs page and noticed that in most (if not all) cases, the Artist field ends up just being filled as "N/A".
Maybe the Artist section could be modified to include other social spaces like Tumblr and AO3, since DW [user name] code makes it possible to directly link to these users' profiles.
In the recs post I just made, I put the Artist Tumblr name in that field - hope that's okay...
Re: Suggestion
I mean, I am not going to be very nitpicky about this if the Tumblr is put in the DW field, rather in the other website fields, but I want to encourage looking for DW names, rather than just any social ones.
Re: Suggestion
Ah okay, good to know.
It is a rather sad state of affairs that even though LJ/DW seems to have retained a modest percentage of the fic writing community, the fan-artists have all but vanished. :b
Re: Suggestion
More tags
Re: More tags
Stories usually make the context clear, and artists may do that in notes, or work very narratively, but often it is up to the observer.
Re: More tags
Re: More tags
In Harry Potter, which is the only other tag with more than a hundred, different tags might help, but those would likely be "character" ones and having character tags just for big fandoms but not small would make me really twitchy.
And since the rec form has a character field and reccer are supposed to always use full names (rather than say "John") you can already just search for those names from the profile anyway.
"Tolkien" seems the next largest with a bit over 80, and there the "natural" division is Silmarillion vs. LOTR vs. The Hobbit, which again is a kind of fandom division, but then several characters are shared across.
The next largest fandoms all have 50-60 recs which is three pages back clicking, so not that bad, and probably still easier than memorizing the DW syntax for combining two tags, to only show gen SPN or SGA recs or such, for which afaik you have to edit the URL with some "mode" thing that I always have to look up. I think most DW users probably aren't even aware this exists.
Re: More tags
Oh I definitely didn't know this existed.
search for those names from the profile anyway.
My bad, I didn't know about THIS search option either! I've been on DW for seven+ years and didn't know about this! man.
So yes, I get your reasoning for not adding other tag categories.
Re: More tags
I didn't mean to sound completely averse to adding to the current system, but I can honestly not think of additions that would be really helpful for browsing, except maybe if the comm would do polls on "special interest" tags for art many want to highlight or look for, like POC characters or female characters or such, but I think uncontroversial systems for that are tricky. I am open to suggestions though.
Re: More tags
Re: More tags
ETA: Those issues aren't necessarily a reason not to have these as extra tags, they are just less simple categories than fandoms, and the possible disagreements over how they should be applied are more contested (and potentially hurtful) than fandom tags, because "gender" as well as "whiteness" (to which POC is usually constructed in opposition) are very fraught categories, and subject to change too. Like another problem with a POC tag would be whether for example in historical period fandoms characters that at that time were excluded from counting as "white" should "count" or not because today they are mostly considered "white"; or what about characters that could "pass" but identify as POC culturally? What about Latin@ characters? Latin@ characters are definitely underrepresented in US media, but can considered white or not in an US context depending on ancestry, and other countries have their own historically grown systems of (degrees) of privilege that correlate with skin tone, ethnicity (and other things). Count all otherwise "unmarked" manga characters from Japan as "POC" because there the "default" is Japanese, which would be a POC in an US context, or don't they count because they aren't "minority" characters and the tag is supposed to encourage representation?
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An exception would be if the artist originally distributed their art with a license that explicitly allowed reposting elsewhere with credit or something like that, and was allowing others to repost their artwork and the Tumblr post makes it clear that their upload was legit (like referring posting under a CC-license or even an informal equivalent, e.g. "X said I could repost their art on Tumblr because they don't have an account" or such). Then reccing it would be okay, because the artist could not expect the deletion of their dA account to fully delete their art, as it would be if they never allowed others to repost their art, just somebody on Tumblr did it anyway without permission.
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