deviantart.com, redbubble.com

For the past year I have been a member of two social networking groups designed for artists, deviantart.com and redbubble.com.

The aim of both of these groups is art sales, printing, and merchandising, as well as to provide a forum for critique and fan building.  Both sites take a portion of the print sales and ship merchandise to fans or the artists themselves.  Artists get a discounted price on merchandise.

Redbubble is less well known, and particularly suited for an older crowd of more serious artists, particularly fine artists and vector-pop artists.  The comments tend to be insightful and the art is generally well developed and original.

DeviantArt is a more popular site primarily populated by artists between 18 and 24 years old, and includes fan art.  There is a larger amount of less developed artwork on deviantart, due to its popularity and its inclusiveness to fan-artists.  DeviantArt has a wider variety of mediums than redbubble, including video and flash .swf files.

This article expresses the worry for low levels of copyright protection on DeviantArt.com :

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/05/29/art-theft-scandals-rock-deviantart/

As an example of the sites' services, here are my public profiles on each:

http://audiovisualsoul.deviantart.com/

http://www.redbubble.com/people/audiovisualsoul



http://audiovisualsoul.deviantart.com/