A quick update on the feedback community

Heyo!

I’m still working on getting this feedback community off the ground. I got a little derailed by work and family stuff including a trip back home when my Dad was back in the hospital. He’s still doing well overall, it’s just that acute pancreatitis sucks and his case is one of the worst. We were told he’d probably be in and out of the hospital for months, but he’s still making a lot of progress.

If you missed it, this is the feedback community I’m talking about:

An Exciting New Direction

·

June 20, 2025

You guys, I’ve had this idea in my head for a while now and it absolutely won’t go away. It’s something I really want to exist, so I’m gonna make it exist! And I’m telling you about it first.

Not sure how many of you saw it, but I ran a teensy feedback test in my chat a few weeks back. I wanted to see if Substack’s built-in community features would work well for providing feedback. Thanks so much to the readers who shared work! For those of you who missed it, you can scroll up in the Picture Practice chat to check it out.

It was such a small test that I don’t want to make too many assumptions, but one thing I think is pretty certain is that Substack’s chat is not an ideal place for conversations around feedback. We need a more robust platform with different channels so we can organize by topic and have multiple asynchronous conversations. That was my hypothesis, but what’s a hypothesis if you don’t test it?

So here’s what I’m thinking: I want to pair Substack and Instagram with some kind of community forum that is made for conversations. The forum will be the place for sharing work, feedback, and having conversations around improving our art and creating career opportunities. I was planning to use Discord, but Yulken Go mentioned Discourse, which looks a bit more scalable so I’m looking into that. I’ve nixed a few other options, but I’m open to suggestions if there’s a platform you particularly like.

The community will be organized like this (to start):

• The forum is where we’ll share work and feedback, and have conversations around improving our art and creating career opportunities

• Substack is where I’ll feature artists and guest mentors, and share what we’re learning in the group

• Instagram is where I’ll share your work to a dedicated account to help amplify your reach

The frequency of the latter two are very much tbd. I believe in giving back, so building a framework that helps promote your work feels really worthwhile to me. At the same time, I’m a working artist so I need to make sure I dedicate enough time to my own practice. It’s all about finding the right balance!

So now that we’ve talked about software, let’s talk about framework.

I had a vision of a place where we would present reasonably polished work, get feedback, and then revise it. I’d share a few before and afters here on Substack and Instagram (for those who want the promotion) and talk about the feedback each artist received and how they responded to it. It would make a very neat and tidy story for promotional purposes, but is it realistic?

Once you’ve taken something to final, how often do you really want to go back into it? TBH, I don’t even want to do it when a client is paying me to! 😆

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career as an art director and then illustrator, it’s that feedback should come early and often. It should be baked into the process. So there’s not really a shiny before and after to share. But there is a story of how a piece of art evolved over time, and I think that can be really helpful to see.

There’s still a lot to figure out. Fortunately I don’t need to figure it all out by myself, so I’m putting together a poll so you can weigh in on what appeals to you. I’ll send it out next Monday, so keep an eye out for it. Thanks!