"What are you, 5 years old?"

The act of sharing artwork online was still a new concept around 2004. Before I joined Drunk Duck, I thought it would be a cool idea to share some of my daily sketches from my first high school art class with the Internet. My initial reasoning was that I could spend a lot of my free time drawing in my sketchbook and then place it on the shelf to collect dust OR I could take grainy photographs of them with my pixelated webcam and share them with strangers.

I guess I was much too optimistic about human nature and the anonymity of the Internet especially when it comes to leaving comments. Hey, I'll admit, whenever I am streaming videos online, one of my favourite joys is scrolling through the comment section and having a good laugh. Reading funny comments makes the whole experience worthwhile.

So, I should not have been surprised when I returned to my digital portfolio and saw that someone had left this comment under one of my high school scribbles:

"What are you, 5 years old?"

At the moment, I can take the jab from a random commenter because I know I can draw much better today. I had learned so much more about perspective drawing, digital art, and architectural design that the comment was more of a criticism of my art style in high school. By the time I discovered the comment, I had already been continuously drawing daily for years because of my webcomic.

But then I have to take a step back and wonder what the outcome would have been if I had read that same comment the day I had posted that sketch when I was a teenager. It probably would have made me livid at first, then embarrassed, and then without saying anything, I would have packed up my pencils and placed them in a drawer and avoided drawing for years. I never would have been able to improve my art without any practice and I would have stayed at the same drawing maturity as a five year old well into adulthood.

The Internet is a mishmosh of random interaction. On one hand, we have the ability to make someone's day with a simple positive comment. But we also have the same ability to discourage and hurt a person's feelings when leaving a negative comment.

Drunk Duck has an amazing commenting system and the quick turnaround on feedback is one of the reasons I was hooked from the start and continued to improve my own art style. I give a lot of credit to the positive feedback from other members on this site because it largely impacted my transitioning art style

We all have a choice for the type of comment we decide to post online. Anonymous comments have the ability to build someone's self-esteem by leaps and bounds, but they also have the power to hinder improvement. Make the most conscientious choice.


QUACKCAST DISCUSSION

How do you go about World building?

ozoneocean writes:

I want to do a quackcast on this topic and would really welcome contributions :)

Kroatz and Skoolmunkee did a Quackcast on this for number 39 http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/quackcast/episode-39-its-my-world-i-can-break-the-rules/, but all the early quackcasts were deleted to save space so that no longer exists. :(
So it's time to take another look at this one!!!

How do YOU go about it? What are your thoughts on it in general?

Personally I think that if your world is really different to our own so that it NEEDS building, then you should do a thorough, detailed job of it so that you really know what you're doing and so that the things within it all make sense and feel more real and believable. If you put that work in in the beginning it'll be a lot less work as you go along because things in your story will be a lot easier to write and events will make more sense.

BUTTTTTT, all of that world building should stay private knowledge: you don't tell the reader how things are setup, what the political system of your world is, their farming methods, and world history unless it's really, really needed. No blocks of text explaining all the wars and lines of kings and queens etc.
Have all that world building be implicit, not explicit: The information should come out naturally from events in the story. If you really need to tell us about the history of the wars that happened then have a character explain it to another character in the context of a conversation about it, a news broadcast or a classroom or something.

-You can always bung all your world building work in an appendix or wiki page for people to research and marvel at. Don't let it weigh down your work.

So that's just my take on it. There's a LOT more to be said and I want to hear it :)
Not many stories even need much world building or any at all. That's important to remember as well.

Link: http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/177032/

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Do you have any original art to contribute to our stock image database, announcements, community projects, ideas, news, or milestones to report? Please leave general comments below or send a PQ to kawaiidaigakusei. Email me at kawaiidaigakusei(at)gmail(dot)com.