What You Love is What People Want to See

Hi. Lovely to be here with the citizens of Civit AI.

For those of you who do not know me—arguably, most of you don't know me—I'm Rhailo/Kadence. Rhailo gets a ton of traffic, hence the name drop, but if you still do not know anything I've done, that's okay.

For this little conversation, it doesn't matter much.

I come from a community of adult writers. We have the full spread, RPers to published authors, newcomers to longstanding wordsmiths. When I joined Civit AI a couple of months ago, I was leaving behind years of Midjourney, most of which was dedicated to original character art for the characters I write as, for, and with.

Hence Kadence. Hence Rhailo. Hence, I've tagged many other names to keep up with my piles of self-perpetuating character art.

What I didn't expect to do was dabble in "art". My purposes were utilitarian, in a sense, and focused on portraits of imaginary people I'm fond of. I think it's a writer's secret passion to create as much content as possible for the characters they've grown to love. The same can be said for fandom, too. We—the collective We—get a sense of satisfaction in seeing our thoughts and ideas blooming into substantial entities.

From this, I get to my point:

Whatever you make, here or elsewhere, you have an audience. If you find yourself getting discouraged because you put time and effort into prompts and generations that didn't garner attention immediately, keep going. Make another handful of pictures. Make a thousand more if that's what you want to do. Even the most niche concepts have people interested in them because you're interested in the work you produce, and your interest is the most important factor you'll ever account for.

Otherwise? Tag your work. Branch out. Test styles. Stay fresh.

If you like a particular style of art, exhaust it with all the ideas in your head. If you like a particular character, make art for them in every plausible combination of assets you can get your hands on. If you don't think it's doable, go look at Rhailo. I have 1k+ images, half of which are experimental "styles" and "concepts" that never drew anyone's interest... but I love them.

Love your work and others will grow to love it as well. Also, lastly—use the tools available to you. The site has guides. The discord is full of friendly people. The community is a community you're a part of.

This community is your community.

Thanks for dropping by for this musing.