i started an art account on Tumblr in October 2024 and an account on Tiktok in July 2025 after years of not maintaining an art account of any sort and my experiences so far have been pretty interesting. as a brief background, i’ve been an artist since I was a very little girl, and have tried running art accounts at various points in my life. other than my current accounts, i’ve been on Instagram and Twitter in the past, and have been a participant in fandom culture for forever now. i am self-taught and a very casual artist who primarily draws for myself as my target audience: basically i just draw however and whatever i want, whenever i want LOL.
as for my recent art accounts, i started my tumblr account when i brought it up casually to my friends as something i maybe wanted to try out and was encouraged to do it (shoutout lauren). i wanted to do it on tumblr because out of all the social media platforms i’m on, tumblr was the most appealing- attention makes me shy and i get a little anxious about looking at numbers and metrics. on tumblr, no one sees how many views or followers or whatever you get. YOU don’t even see how many followers you have unless you open your settings up to see.
i also have a deathly fear of flopping lmfao. YES, the scariest thing ever in the whole wide world is getting two likes on a post :(( tumblr is pretty friendly compared to most of these other platforms (where no one gaf if you get two likes on a post) and i was less afraid of flopping there, so i thought i’d start there, have some fun, and if i wanted to expand to other platforms later, i’d do that. tumblr was going to be something easy and chill and fun that i wouldn’t burn out from or develop anxiety about.
and it is pretty easy and chill and fun! i’m just posting whatever i drew that i wanted to post. after posting a few times and seeing how engagement worked, i generally didn’t care if i got 30 notes or 300 notes on a post. i was happy when i’d get a new follower, or when people would write things in the tags when they reblogged my stuff, but generally i’m not like “ooomg how many new likes did i get today?? who just followed me??” because i’m not getting an INSANE amount of attention to begin with. i think the most amount of notes i’ve gotten is 130ish which is respectable imo.
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i started my tiktok art account even more recently because 1. i was curious what the experience would be and 2. i love tiktok #sueme. the amount of time i spend on every other social media i have in comparison to tiktok is basically minute lol. idk bro their algorithm is just great. and where else am i gonna get like three thirst trap edits of characters from my current interests in a row. twitter????? dont make me laugh. also i have to admit that the level of virality and reach possible on TT is interesting. nowhere else do you get a FYP where you can see multiple videos with hundreds of thousands of likes from people you’ve never encountered before. like how?? and can that happen to me?? lol. like you never know!
i’ve had my TT art account for about a month now and uhhh yeah. the experience here compared to tumblr is WILDLY different. my first post got 40ish views and under 10 likes- rough. my second ever post currently has 1500ish views and over 500 likes- HUH??? like alright. awesome. cool. WHAT!! ever since then i’ve been like “can i do this again?” and apparently i can because my most popular post so far is at 10.3k views and 2300 likes HUUUUHHHH?!??! and yeah you can probably guess where this goes because i became obsessed with looking at my logistics every few hours. the cherry on top is my push notifs don’t work properly for TT so i get push notifs very rarely and i only see how many notifications i have when i open the app… so i open the app even more now than i used to.
i haven’t gotten nearly as much traction on anything else i’ve posted since then and i’ve since chilled out about numbers (sort of) but like good god. that’s a high i’ll forever chase i guess. i understand what fame and attention can do to people now (joke). but it was just so interesting to me how there’s such polar opposite experiences out there. i recently hit 30 followers on tumblr, which is pretty amazing to me, even as i hit 240 followers on tiktok around the same time. and again- i’m content with that 30 on tumblr because, yeah, it’s just tumblr, but on tiktok, i’m like, so i’ll hit 300 soon and then 400 and then 1000 and then i can move to LA!!!!!! (joke)
and perhaps these experiences can coexist and totally won’t affect me psychologically at all. no way. also i get way funnier comments on tiktok. while i love all (nice) comments people are just willing to be unabashedly freaked out on TT and like… if my fanart helped YOU realize that YES john marston rdr1 era IS hot actually then thats a feather in my cap. i’ve done my duty.
ending with a shameless plug and i really should carve out a space to put my art on my website but if you’d like to see my stuff i’m @viramixu virtually everywhere :0) !
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