As many of you know, most Fridays are “Fan Art Friday” on the Spiral Knights Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ outposts. With some regularity, players ask what factors we consider when deciding which pieces to feature. That’s a fair question!
How we gather Fan Art Friday candidates:
During the week, Aphrodite does a basic sweep of the main sites where SK fan art is commonly found--deviantArt, Tumblr, the Treasure Vault section of the SK forums, and Reddit, usually. Links to 10-20 candidate pieces are gathered into a document for consideration.
In addition to Aphrodite’s efforts, any member of the SK team can bring stuff to our attention, and players can post about pieces on the SK forums and social media. On top of that, on Friday mornings, I do my own search to see whether anything brand new has popped up.
By the way, by “fan art,” we really mean any Spiral Knights-related thing created by a player--videos, homages, fun screenshots, mashups, music, master’s theses, cosplay, podcast episodes, etc. qualify.
Factors we take into account:
- Does it appear to have taken considerable effort, skill, talent, determination, creativity, or a mix of the above?
- Is it nicely presented--is it scanned in well, or does it have a neat “Here’s how I made this” section? That sort of thing. If you create something totally amazing and then post a blurry photograph of it, well, we might post it anyway. But presentation does help.
- Is it hosted on an appropriate website? There are certain sites we can’t/won’t link to: sites that summon a bunch of popups, that make you click through a bunch of pages to get to the art, that have inappropriate ads, that require signup to see the art, that contain malware, and the like.
- What’s the artist commentary like? Comments that are amusing, insightful, touching, useful, intelligent, are a plus. Verbiage of any type we couldn’t post on the SK forums is a definite minus. This includes categorization tags, btw.
- Did we already post something from this artist recently? We try to mix it up, adding in fresh faces without leaving established folks in the dust. On occasion, we do post the same artist a couple weeks in a row. However, we consciously aim for variety.
- Is it currently entered in a staff-run contest? To avoid the appearance of impropriety, we may leave it alone until the judging is over, or we might post it in a separate post about contest winners. No hard feelings, eh?
- Is it a proposed addition to the game? We have to be careful about appearing to endorse or commit to specific proposals. Yes, that is a bummer.
- Is the artist credited? We want artists to get credit, recognition, and web traffic for their work. A post consisting solely of an uploaded image, with no indication of who made it, is not helpful.
- Is it stolen? We don’t encounter much stolen art, but if we see something we remember from elsewhere, we will check that out to the best of our ability before posting.
- Is it PG-13? Yeah. :)
- Is the piece, you know, good? Is it awesome, even? (You bet this is subjective. No point in denying that.)
- Will the SK community probably appreciate it?
Facebook and Google+
- We post one piece per week, on Fridays, unless something we can’t ignore comes up during the week. Facebook users don’t tolerate much in the way of frequent posts. On days when we post more than once about anything, we see more “unlikes” than on days with single posts. We mirror our Facebook posts on Google+.
- Google+ is not an official social media outpost for SK. We’re in a trial phase with it. Still, if you wanna follow SK there, please do!
On Twitter, we have the luxury of being more spammy, so we select between three and eight pieces to tweet out 10-15 minutes apart on Friday afternoons.
How do I get my creations noticed as candidates for Fan Art Friday?
Lots of you get noticed just by doing what you’re already doing. But you can also:
- Post your creations on the intertubes, ideally on one of the sites mentioned above as the ones we regularly search. If you hate those sites, do post somewhere else where you are credited as the artist, and then post a link in Treasure Vault. Or, you can get on Twitter and tweet the link and a short description at @SpiralKnights.
- Twitter is preferred over Facebook or Google+ for getting our (and other players') attention directly. Anyone on the internet can see your tweet, but Facebook requires a login and certain profile settings for everyone to be able to see your art post.
- Tweeting it at us has the added benefit of giving us the option to retweet you directly to all of @SpiralKnights’ followers.
- On Twitter, we use the hashtag #skfanart for our fan art tweets, and so should you! It’s a bit of an echo chamber in there right now. We’d welcome more people tweeting to that tag.
- Be sure to tag your work with “Spiral Knights” wherever you host it.
For any of you who have been diligently creating away and have not yet been featured on Fan Art Friday, please don't take that as a condemnation or a criticism of your hard work. We may not have seen it, or we may be holding it to post with others of a certain theme, or who knows? We love that people find Spiral Knights inspiring. Thank you, thank you, thank you forever for making cool SK stuff.
Got questions? Please ask.
You mentioned Deviant Art. What about other online galleries that don't have pop-ups, malware, excessive clicking, required signups and such? Assuming the image is SFW, do you consider other galleries like Elfwood, Fur Affinity or Pixiv?