As mentioned in my last post, I will be going over the two most prominent kinds of art that are found on Instagram: illustrations and photography. This week, I’ll start by exploring the types of content that make up illustrations. Such Illustrations aren’t produced through one particular medium, with artists across the platform specializing in a variety of tools and methods that work towards making their content unique. However, I’d like to primarily focus on digitally-produced works this week, as the physical ones require photography to capture.
One of the most common approaches towards being an artist on Instagram is to post illustrations that have been produced through digital means. An advantage that this approach has over other more traditional means of illustrating is that the artists can directly upload their content straight to Instagram. Any kind of physical art, such as sketches or paintings, would have to be photographed first; these added processes add additional work and can often lead to a significant reduction in detail. However, with digital art, it’s much easier to cater content towards the restrictions that are inherent to a digital platform. Even with Instagram being quite particular with its aspect ratio and sizing options, digital artists can easily structure their work in a way that fits onto a consistent canvas size that will always meet Instagram’s preferences. As evident with most of the examples below, the go-to-dimension is a 1:1 ratio (a perfect square); doing so prevents Instagram from cropping the image when it is being displayed in a condensed format. As for the specific content, the kinds I saw through the many illustrations I came across often varied significantly from user to user. While browsing, many that I saw consisted of an artist’s unique take on an existing person/property. The artist can target audiences that are interested in that type of content that is being represented in their illustrations through the inclusion of relevant hashtags (i.e. #pokemon, #kpop).
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| by user @kioraka on Instagram |
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| by user @warickaart on Instagram |
However, there was also an abundance of works featuring entirely original concepts.
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| by user @jasavrts on Instagram |
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| by user @rodtten on Instagram |
The most successful illustrators seemed to be the ones that posted a fairly regular stream of content, with one of the most popular formats being comedic and/or wholesome webcomics that featured multiple panels of illustrations that would link to form a cohesive narrative. Many comic artists take advantage of Instagram’s ability to include multiple images within one post, allowing each image to act as an individual panel of the comic. It seems to be an effective approach, as it allows artists to display their individual illustrations at a greater scale. And, for the audience, it even adds somewhat of an interactive element, as it’s almost as if they’re flipping through individual pages of a virtual comic book.
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| works by user @shencomix on Instagram |
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| works by user @nathanwpylestrangeplanet on Instagram |
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