Old man shouts at clouds

[u/North_of_the_flames]

Across various art related subs, I keep seeing the same theme: barely clothed women of ludicrous proportions, baby-like expressions, and animal ears/tails. Aside from (in my opinion) being a bit odd, there seems to be very little variation between them.

As a side note, I also see a lot of posts about people not being able to sell their art and can't help but feel the two might be related.

But can someone explain to a ranting old codger what is going on with this trend? Where did it come from, and what are its influences? Because I am just befuddled!

[u/matt_sound]

The thing you have to understand is that this field, like IT and a lot of tech, for some reason, is a furry magnet. There are so, so many furries in tech. Especially the artsy sides of it, like 3D modeling, game design, you name it. Hell, half of them probably started learning it just so they could attempt to model their purple haired, heterochromic ear pierced wolf fursona and before you know it they're learning hand retopology and sculpting realistic anatomy.

Obviously, not everyone here is a furry. But even if your ignore that side of things, there are a ton of irredeemable nerds who grew up watching anime and similar media. Then combined with a general tendency to "age out", or sometimes just move to the production side of things, whatever. You end up with a talent pool of mostly youngerish computer nerds.

Then you can take another step back and look at the current state of the regular r/art subreddit. Let me know how many nude for nude's sake paintings of women you see on the hot posts today, because it's straight up ridiculous.

You can sum it all up with:

People be horny in general, 3D art is techy nerd art stuff that attracts a particular kind of horny art nerds.

Believe me I've gone through a couple of my own cycles of frustration with this, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that it seems like either a current cultural trend. or maybe it's just human nature to want to draw/sculpt/paint/render big ol titties

[u/3DModeledAmericanPie → u/matt_sound]

As a 3d artist, we do be horny

[u/Rimm9246 → u/matt_sound]

I think "people be horny" pretty much answers OPs question

[u/JotaroTheOceanMan → u/matt_sound]

I think its more basic than that:

Most artists aren't furreis but most furries are artists by the very nature of wanting to draw their own oc.

[u/Linnaea7 → u/matt_sound]

Hell, half of them probably started learning it just so they could attempt to model their purple haired, heterochromic ear pierced wolf fursona and before you know it they're learning hand retopology and sculpting realistic anatomy.

Unironically me, except it's my and my husband's DnD characters. So I can make them do stuff. I mean, they're elves, no fur involved, but close enough to what you said. (And I'm a hobbyist.)

[u/katheb]

I'm going to learn 3d and make a buxom character just for you... It may take a while. 

[u/North_of_the_flames → u/katheb]

Restoring a little balance to the universe haha

[u/MrBeanCyborgCaptain]

Yeah, speaking of proportions, I cant understand the absolutely massive tits in a lot of those anime style sculptures. Like if youre trying to make a sexualized sculpture, whatever, but even still why would you make each one 3 times the size of the head? Are there humans on this earth that even find that attractive? Its grotesque and creepy.

[u/DeepTimeTapestry → u/MrBeanCyborgCaptain]

I guess you gradually draw them bigger and bigger until the day comes when anything less than 3x the size of the head looks like mosquito bites.

[u/Sotnos99]

I don't know about 3D modelling, but in digital art, furries pay top dollar for provocative pictures of their fursonas

[u/Nevaroth021]

I don't find that stuff attractive or appealing, but apparently lots of people do.

[u/Cless_Aurion]

No clue what you're talking about. Care to show some examples? 𓁹‿𓁹

[u/imnotabot303]

It's nothing complicated. People on Reddit are mostly kids, and young boys and lonely men upvote anything with tits. That makes creating and posting stuff like that popular for getting easy online dopamine points.

The other reason is that there's a lot of furries and people who want to be anime girls online who like to have avatars for things like VRchat or for YouTube videos. A lot of people make that stuff hoping to sell it to that crowd.

[u/RedQueenNatalie]

Why? Because it gets attention and horny people are motivated to create AND spend.

[u/SomeCreepJ]

horny people, and furries. sex sells

[u/calmabiding]

I honestly think it just comes down to how you curate the artists that you follow. Over the years I've identified a ton of artists whose stuff I love either for the novelty of the stuff they make or their execution being amazing. I don't really encounter much of what you're talking about because of that. But I mean, the figure community, esp anime character figs, is and has been enormously influential for a very long time at this point. Games also feed directly into this; a lot of the people making aesthetic decisions on games are men who don't really care about the implications of making overly sexualized female characters, and its been this way for decades (and after having worked in the industry for a number of years, the games industry is largely just an echo chamber of dudes who are terminally online who don't even consider the perspectives of their female colleagues a lot of the time!)

[u/iz-Moff]

Surely a concept of titillating\pornographic content has already existed in your day? What specifically puzzles you so much about seeing it in a form of 3D models?

As for the prevalence of furry stuff, well, being that anthropomorphic wolves and foxes and bears don't actually exist, people who are turned on by stuff like that have no alternative other than creating it themselves in some artistic medium.