Something is happening in the emoticon galleries, something that has been lurking in the shadows since the dawn of deviantART. It began to rear its ugly head about a year ago, and is now happily stomping through the galleries as it pleases. What I’m talking about here, is the practical grinding to a halt of nigh on all emoticon based creativity and imagination.

First and foremost; if you’re reading this as an emoticonist, I can safely say that this will probably offend you in some way or another. That is, if you are easily offended by an opinion. If you don’t like it, you should turn your pansy ass round right now and go hide back under your rock.

I say opinion, but the sad truth is – this article is more of a look at my opinion on what is unfortunately good old fashioned solid fact. Let us look at a few case studies before we add it all up and see what we get.

The Generation Gap

=brokenboulevard Has already touched upon this theory of mine, which is handy, as I don’t have to explain it quite as much. For those of you who aren’t aware what I’m prattling on about, or who are just too plain lazy to find out, it’s the breakdown of this most pixellated of places that is ‘the emoticon community’ into different generations of emoticonists. First of all, I should say that these are just generalisations and indefinite examples. They should not be taken as finger pointing and absolute final judgemental truth.

At the top of the pile you have your first generation emoticonists. These are the old school guys like =darkmoon3636, !camelhijackation, `budgieishere =brokenboulevard etc. They pretty much started all the styles and emote rules you see around today, after all, there is no school like the old school! Unfortunately, for the most part, they aren’t as active as they once were.

Next up you’ve got your 2nd generation emoticonists. People like =sereneworx, `koffeeben, *sml-e and myself. Second generation breathed new life into the community. Started a funk-load of clubs and randomness, and basically brought in a new batch of fun. You’d think from these two generations, that the logical projection for a third generation would be something like this...

“3rd Generation emoticonists brought in a whole new set of fresh skills and ideas. Building upon the already established community, they make people proud to call themselves an Emoticonist.”

Unfortunately, it does appear to pan out to be quite the opposite. The emoticon gallery seems to be stagnating. It’s filling up with badly realised emoticons from deviants who look to be making no progress with their skills. I don’t mean deviants who progress slower than others, I’m talking about the deviants who create an undeniably poor emoticon, and are totally satisfied with their work. Sitting in their pool of fetid satisfaction, they continue to churn out emote after crappy emote. There have always been these deviants, but they’ve really hit a boom recently. Just today I came across a deviant who embodies everything that is wrong with the community, like some kind of living model on what not to do. I’m sure you’ll run into them sooner or later.

It turns out that emoticons are one of the most popular art forms on the site, and quite a considerable amount of these recent additions to the community have gotten into making them; not because they enjoy the challenge of the pixelling or the animation, but because it will get them a bucket load of page views. This does not go for every recent deviant who has just taken their first steps on the emoticon road, as there are definitely some gems in there, but these deviants are drastically outnumbered by those spewing detritus.

This problem is very close to one deviant’s heart. ~E-motive is not active in the creative sense anymore, as he became tired of seeing the same old crap over and over. His notion is that creativity breeds creativity. He told me he used to browse the galleries and become inspired by what he saw. He would get an idea from the gaps in between what had already been created. This may be the key to what kept the emoticons so fresh for so long. You cannot argue that these gaps are now closed, that is just like shutting off an artist’s imagination. There is no reason for every other emoticon to be a ninja or a “tard”, other than the fact that the majority of people would rather “revamp” existing emoticons instead of creating fresh ideas. Hey, it takes less imagination, why bother trying that little bit harder?

Reading through the comments on =brokenboulevard’s journal, some of the ideas about which examples belong in which generation differ slightly, but the general consensus is that as a rule, the theory works. It is however, turning out to be somewhat of a double-edged sword. I came up with this generation theory to ease my explanations of what is going on with the community, but it is apparently ushering in a whole new problem. People are apparently desperate to know to what generation they ‘belong’ and are trying to justify being in a certain one over another. These people are missing the point. The generations themselves mean nothing. It does not matter to which generation of emoticonist you think you belong, what matters is that you are here on deviantART as an artist and not seeking out some contrived form of social status.

deviantART, The Popularity Contest

This one applies to the whole of the site, but as I’m only looking at what I know and understand the most, we’ll keep it applied to the microcosm of the emoticon galleries. Turns out, everyone and everything is about page views around this place! Didn’t you know? It's all about who is the more popular deviant! Apparently it’s not about creating art and bettering your skills...Who knew?!

One of the sure-fire ways to get yourself noticed, aside from copying a more popular deviant’s style, is to get the other deviants to do the art for you! We’ll just call it a "Project" to be safe, but what it involves is coming up with a background of some sorts. It can be blank, but for the optimum page views to effort ratio, you’ll probably need some form of gimmick. That’s right, you’ve got to use a little imagination, but don’t worry – you got to spend money to make money - it’ll pay off in the end. Once you have your background, all you need to do is mosey on over to the news section, and post up an article asking for deviants to join your project. All you have to do is copy and paste other people’s work into your deviation, then you just sit back as your page views count up. Its genius! From what I’ve seen recently, you’ll only get real interest from those of a third generation inclination, those who are also thirsty for page views. Turns out, the few first and second generation artists that were interested in the first couple of "projects" lost interest after about the fifty-millionth one. This path is the path the aforementioned living case study is following.

Of course, if a project isn’t up your street, you could always make sure you have a “cool” avatar. Make sure you don’t understand why certain deviants have a certain avatar, and make sure you only want it because it looks cool. Make sure that you don’t attempt to make your own, because it’s not like an avatar is a pixellated representation of the artist at all. After you’ve gotten your “cool” avatar, make sure to pull on your wool and make it back to your herd before teatime.

A great example of this happening was the ‘Great Thrusty Virus’. First of all, it was not thrusting, it was humping! That’s what me =Zikes and =brokenboulevard called it when we changed our avatars to a humping animation as part of an inside joke from an MSN conversation. It seems the title was changed in the interests of political correctness when everyone decided they wanted a humping avatar too. It lost its meaning, and, quite frankly filled me with a certain ambivalence. On one hand, it was fairly humbling to see an idea grow so massive, but it was also quite cutting that people would just assume that it was okay to just take the idea. The point where I got totally pissed off with it was when I repeatedly came across deviants who didn’t even know where it all started; they just had them because someone else did.

Here’s the ironic truth. The deviants that crave popularity do so by being exactly the same as their ‘heroes’, yet their ‘heroes’ got there by being something fresh and original that people remembered amongst all the mimicry. That’s so ironic, you could make fucking girders out of it! Try a little imagination and originality; it’ll do you wonders! Course, if all you are here for is the popularity, and using imagination isn’t your forte, then I guess you’ll have to move over to tracing badly drawn anime or something – that seems to work. Alternatively, you could pretend you’re someone else…

Styles

I’m becoming rather bored of seeing deviations entitled “My New Shading Style” and the such-like. If you have a new shading style; unless you are making some kind of Andy Warhol statement, make an emoticon with it, not a bunch of multicoloured spheres. You are not the style you choose to shade in, you are the imagination you choose to wield.

It also seems that if galleries aren’t full of badly done emoticons, they’re full of emoticons in the style of other deviants. Never before have I seen so many galleries that look exactly the bloody same! And it's on the increase. Now I am a firm believer in the notion that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but this is really taking it too far. If you go so far as to mimic another deviant’s shading styles, expression styles, even the same animation style, that’s not imitation – that’s just plain copying! Just a point to consider… saying you are “inspired” by the deviant you are copying does not make it okay. I confronted one deviant about how their gallery appears to be a complete carbon copy of another deviant’s. They didn’t appear to mind that they have a severe lack of imagination. They embraced the fact that they had been outright copying another deviant’s style.

=sereneworx’s style seems to be one of the favourite styles to emulate. I suppose I can see why. He has a very nice style of shading and animation, but it is just that. It is his style! I have often discussed with =sereneworx about what he feels about people practically ripping his art on a day-to-day basis. Be it his vector-mask based avatars, his general emoticon style, even his Hexopus character, which was ripped off at one point, (I shit you not) His basic feelings on the matter were all the same. “It's bad, but what can I do?”. In essence, he’s given up defending his art on the basis that he’s just one person. There is power in numbers, and because there is an absolute fuck-load of people that fall into the bad three quarters of the third generation category, the deviants that are being emulated are pretty much being overwhelmed by the whole deal. Maybe I’m just more passionate about my art form than I ought to be, but surely deviants should stand up for what they create? If I come across anyone that is ripping me off, I make sure I go about sorting them out. I enjoy creating what I create, and quite rightly give a rat’s ass when someone decides they want my ideas for a fraction of the effort.

Taking myself as an example, if one is to browse through my gallery from the beginning, one would notice a progression of my skills through my work. I learnt to make emotes from *dutchie17’s tutorial. You can see the similarities between the bland style in the tutorial and my first emoticons. As my skills progressed, so did my style. I moved away from the gradient shading and moved into pixelling smoother shading. I was actually proud that I had learnt enough to make that step on my own. I did this because I am never totally satisfied with what I have created, I have to make it better, improve upon it with the next submission. It seems that there aren’t enough people like me anymore; people are too easily satisfied with their work. A word of advice... Your skills as an artist have finished when you can look at your work and think, “Yes, I am totally happy with that, there’s nothing I could do better next time.” If you are looking at your work, and it is in the style of another deviant, trust me, you are not happy with that. You have to move away from the imitations - your only boundary is yourself.

It is also worth mentioning that no one ever copies the style of a deviant who is less well known. Bringing us again, back to the popularity contest.

Tardmotes

Lets get this out of the way straight away. "Tardmote" should not be a genre of emoticon. Unfortunately however, it has become one because of deviants with a lack of imagination again latching onto something that looks “cool”. For those inevitable few who don’t know where they originated from, they were created by =darkmoon3636. I absolutely detest receiving a comment on my work that describes it as a “Tardmote”, or anything derived thereof. That is like pointing straight at me, and shouting “art thief!” If you are judging my works to be “Tardmotes” by the fact that they have two dots for eyes, then you are clearly a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Unfortunately, that’s apparently pretty much the criteria for a “Tard” emote. Looking at the original “Tardmotes”, there is more to them than dotted eyes and nice shading. =darkmoon3636 herself has spoken out about how she hates the fact that people have taken the name “Tardmote” and made it into something it was never intended to be. This is amongst one of the reasons why she isn’t as active anymore. Many of the other reasons have already been outlined in this journal.

In conclusion

What I have attempted to outline here is the problems the emoticon gallery is currently facing. I don’t like to see the art form I enjoy going down the pan like this. I don’t like seeing friends like ~E-motive lose interest in it because of problems in the community. I do however, feel I’m going to have to go about this with =sereneworx’s mentality. I’m just one deviant and short of writing this article, there really isn’t anything else I can do. I do hope it’s raised a few points for discussion. Before I open up the floor for all the argument, take this into consideration… If after reading this, you feel the need to defend yourself, then you and your guilty conscience should take a time out to contemplate the state of your gallery.