Does anyone know of a good art critiquing site that actually gives a crap? DA is full of thieves and yes-men, Epilogue is pretty much dead and ConceptArt only cares if you're already great. I need help with making for a friend.

I've heard/seen good things about the permanoobs forums, which are basically like ConceptArt but actually active these days. There's some great artists on there - the catch is that you have to get a bit involved in the community first to make people curious about your sketchbook and to get comments, but that can easily be done by just asking people questions about their techniques and such.

Maybe the average skill level is still too high/intimidating for some people, but they're not elitist or anything.

From what I've seen, anyway, being a lurker my exposure is more or less limited.

This subreddit seems fine, too. Also provides some good resources in the sidebar right off the bat.

Sorry I couldn't make any more suggestions, but as far as art communities go, dA is where people flock to (especially now that cghub has closed down), but I personally can't stand it, either.

I haven't tried getting critiques from DA yet but everyone says they suck.

I've been on dA for about five years before I quit for good and I never got much honest feedback. To be fair, I was too afraid to approach, say, professional artists, so I stuck to the forums, but people were trying to troll more often than help. Very frustrating.

As far as followers/watchers go, you have to attract the right kind of audience that gives out constructive advice and that's extremely difficult - unless you network A LOT, you won't get much of an audience and most often you'll get one that's interested in helping you. They already like what they see, so no critique.

There's also groups that focus on art improvement, but I didn't find those to be helpful. Everyone just submits their art, but never actually comments.

Even a lot of actually amazing artists don't get exposure like you'd think they would. Site's just too large. So even yes-men and thieves aside, I would personally not recommend dA unless you're masterful at networking.

I've never really had the chance to network. I wasn't really close with the other college students and I can't just find someone to network with online since I don't really know anyone. It's not like they'd want to to network with me anyway since I'm almost 30 and have the art skills of a 10-year-old with no thumbs.

Beep boop! This post has been locked due to old age. The necro rule in this forum is 6 months. Please see the official rule listing for more details, or file a ticket if you have any questions.