Only come here now and again and why would be a good question. I’ve been using Blender on and off since version 2.47 and have made a few short animations but now only use the software as a drawing aid for creating comic strips. As is when wanting to save time working out a tricky perspective issue. My software of choice for creating comics, more of the french ‘bande dessinee’ than super hero American comics, is Krita.
Why choose a traditional 2D style of image when software such as Blender can produce such glorious reality? Well, many would say ‘rendered in glorious fakeness’ and that’s probably it, a drawing is more alive, more genuine and so more real than a simulacra no matter how perfectly rendered. Looking at 2.8 as I have these past few days it becomes obvious that indeed ‘medium is message’ and the end goal of the activity some call ‘Blendering’ is not to produce a meaningful visual text but rather to delight in the process of production of some mundane reproduction of a mundane object such as a Italian sports vehicle, a kitchen or twenty-something person with big tits and long blond hair.
Is this the best creators of culture can produce today? Camille Paglia said in an interview with Vice magazine that art today is often derivative, gimmicky and devoid of human emotion. I feel she was been generous because it is by far worse than that - it is boring.
Meanwhile in the fancy pants mega elitist world of fine arts, a canvas covered in white paint just sold for a cool $15 million.
Art is subjective and personal. There are different reasons for creating art, and different reasons for liking art. Some people like to find meaning. Other just like to admire pretty shapes and colors. There’s no wrong answer here. What you might find as a boring technical render, others might see harmony in shape and color.
…but don’t confuse art with design. Design is objective. While design can be aesthetically pleasing, the point isn’t to move your soul. Design serves a function; Architectural Pre-Vis, product design, apparel design, or as a simple showcase of technical execution. These folks hang out here too.
I loath art critics. Their opinions are often lacking in any knowledge of art history (as evident in the very quote above) and they just love to put certain kinds of art on a pedestal; Usually as part of the money making scam on the mega rich that is the fine arts market.
Your french ‘bande dessinee’ art is also derivative, by the by.
Derivative, meaning deriving from, as in art deriving from the french ‘bande dessinee’ style.
Peace. 
I think at a certian level, art is art no matter what the medium. The problem is, many CG artists arent thinking about their work as “art”, it’s just something they do for fun and giggles. I agree, it’s an unfortunate condition. Keep in mind tho, everyone who does Computer Graphics does so for a different reason. People who paint/draw? It’s always to create art. But with CG, you’ve got tons of different interests, like games, design, archviz, just simply making 3d models… a lot of people aren’t in that artistic frame of mind if that makes sense.
If you want to see some lot af renders, check out https://www.instagram.com/holesinshoes3d/?hl=en might make you see 3d differently. His work is never astonishing technically, but MAN are they masterfully works or art.
Anyone try using modern art as a grunge texture?
Me thinking…
Vanity post.
…
Boring, only means too much… & a lack of…
…
Envies of another spoiled brat?!
…
Nobody serves an ass (a.k.a. donkey) with heavenly divine on a crystal plate and even then…
…
Being, lacking intelligence, by nature strives to evolve & overcome these brain damages through iteration of lives.
…
Taking or rather sacrificing own or others…
…
Karma.
…
Reincarnate.
Maybe a different life form helps & one needs to become a fly or a worm once again.
Consider art as a food for soul. So, if one want’s to consume art, one must first understand self… learn about own taste. Also, be aware: “What feeds, kills & heals.”
Learn to balance your diet.
ie. It takes ~20min after consumption, for stomach-brain to compile and send data back as ‘Full configuration’. Then it’s time to start rendering…
There is not a limit to the number of works that can be made with Blender. Some people like to challenge them selves to photoaccurately re-create a car. If you want to create something exiting, non-photo-realistic - then that’s fine! If you want to paint comics, and use Blender for help with perspective then that’s fine! Have you tried to re-create your drawing style in Blender?
I personally WOULD like to see more non-photoreal creative illustration and animation work. I would like to see crazy character rigs for super-expressive flexible characters. I also think Blender CAN be used for this. Eevee can be used for this. Grease Pencil is interesting.
I personally like to go through clips of indy games that have had to have thier own creative style because they don’t have the budget for photo-realism.
…but…
It’s up to you to create (or promote) the artwork you want to see!
What an interesting topic the OP has put up. I pretty much agree with them, it’s almost inevitable given the tool of 3D being such a technical beast, most of the things we produce with it are tests of some kind, and the subject matter is usually quite mundane, the goal is often photo-realism and that’s about it.
To be honest, I’ve had this thought about 3D for years and years, but never had the balls to just put it out there so honestly, I might even think that these forums are not the place for such discussions. But since it has been raised, yeah, 3D has made huge strides over the years, but it’s creatively far behind when compared with other low tech mediums.
Here’s something I found on the forums recently that was pretty damn creative and also photo-real, so we’re not completely lost.
Looking through the forum gallery - I think there’s a mix of all sorts of artwork being made in Blender.
I would worry about the fact there aren’t many woman using Blender. My Youtube channel gets 100% male viewership. I don’t think we’re a toxic or unwelcoming community.
First, let’s remember that art has been around for roughly 100,000 years. CG is not even a blip on that timescale. Which means that as a toolset, we humans haven’t had a lot of time to understand how to use it.
For me, there is opportunity there to find new forms of expressions through this new toolset.
I do agree that cg artworks are not abundant, but it is also reasonable. The “practical” uses of cg are ubiquitous, and may drown the art uses.
Also entertainment is an art and goes by formula, that’s why seeing awesome orcs and elves in an epic battle is entertaining but you don’t go and think Picasso or Mona Lisa. By doing the same formula over and over again that entertains us, it might actually get boring after you noticed a pattern.
To me “superior” art is something that my brain has to earn. When some part of your conscious gets going. Makes you activate different brain waves. A waking up of stagnated part of the mind.
I say brain because it feels so different to me that “I” can’t concept it right away but something happens in my head.
One of these paintings are Saturn Devouring One of His Sons by Goya
The canvas covered with white is itself derivative of an earlier work which was a square canvas covered with black. The point in both instances was to question as we are here, what is art? Strip away form, color, composition, etc, etc, As such the white canvas is a valid work. Pity I didn’t think of it… I could do with the 15 million. LOL
My bande dessinee is not derivative given I was raised and educated in that culture. It is my culture. Whatever and I think you are confusing derivative with cultural appropriation.
Paglia is recognized as one of the world’s top academics and lectures in art history. Could you explain how what she said in the interview I mentioned, makes evident she is lacking ‘any knowledge of art history’.
Absolutely agree as well Linkun and it’s something Paglia also mentions in that interview - the migration of creative talent away from the arts to the game industry. Looking at some works here and elsewhere I see creative talent and great capabilities - so why only do monsters, robots and fluffy bunnies?! We could debate that and the need to make a living would certainly be up there or is it resignation and growing cynicism with the ‘fine art’ environment? Or maybe have we simply given up on attempting to achieve social change through art? Have we given up on beauty and humanity?
For sure Yogyog there is no one way of using Blender and no recreating a drawing style in Blender I don’t believe would work. The technology would get in the way of the intuitiveness of pencil on surface. Technology gives us fantastic tools and Krita is about as close as any technology gets, I haven’t tried grease pencil, to the ‘real’ act of drawing with pencil on paper where intuition plays a big role. Making a model - you did mean re-create in 3D? - rigging, texturing, posing, lighting, etc is a very left hemisphere dominated process which excludes intuition. On that and well before CGI the internationally recognized guru of airbrushed hyper-realism Michael English, concluded his book ‘The Art of Illusion’ by explaining why he swapped the airbrush for paper and stick of charcoal.
djwaterman The need for truth. I believe this is the very place to have this debate and hopefully at the very least encourage people to think differently about the possibilities a tool such as Blender allows. I’ll check out that link. Thanks.
BigBlend - what you describe reminds me of an incident in a juvenile detention center art class I used to give. I decided one day to get the lads to do drip painting and was met with a loud 'what’s this shit - why can’t we do more comic strip heroes?. I used to draw and the boys color in. Fascinating. Anyway the boy who protested the most and after madly throwing paint on several sheets, throwing them aside and starting again, suddenly stopped and motionless stood looking at the last sheet. What, I asked him, is different between that one and the others? I don’t know, he answered, it’s like - I felt something shift inside me.
Oris I agree and it’s a good point that cg has many uses and it can certainly be a highly effective tool in ‘fine art’ if we look at what can be ‘fine art’. As someone put it and can’t remember off the top of my head who is was, the artist’s studio can be a social laboratory within which the artist using his or her, knowledge of the language of signs and symbols creates a hypothesis he (or she) then presents to the public asking the question ‘what if?’ The artist goes beyond accepted boundaries and to do so realism can be the most effective form of visual communication and what better tool to create realistic pictures of what does not exist and/or is not within the framework of established good taste and the social status quo than cg? Hey - and you get this extraordinary tool for free so there is now no socioeconomic limitation. The publishers of the counter-cultural magazines ‘Oz’, ‘Smile’ and ‘Fuck You’ (yes there was such a beast) as just a few examples of the many possible, had to pay for paper and printing and distribution and rely on sales to make the next edition. Now we have the Internet and open source software such as Blender, Krita, Gimp, etc, etc, etc and what do we get?
X015
How about making a change and posting a blender artwork expressing “the boredom of modern 3d art” issue
in a truly artistic way… done in blender preferrably as it is a blender astists forum… 
just an idea
PS. I found some really moving art on this forum. However this is not some Louvre of blneder artwor but just a forum. If you’d go to an art shool for example, i bet you’d find much more “boring stuff” than “moving art” there. People are learning and not every piece of art or even craft is destined to be a masterpiece anyway.
Jarek D(DJ)
I just thought I’d post this - not my own creation - as an example of some incredibly expressive Blender art - that uses the medium of CGI in it’s expressiveness.