Patrice Leymarie

The IT’S ART founder on showing your work and how to get noticed

How does an artist go about attracting the right kind of attention on your site?

I’m always trying to find new talent. I’m proud to have interviewed people such as Raphael Lacoste, Michael Kutsche and Loïc Zimmermann. But there are no rules to gaining notoriety online. Anyway, the goal should not to become a CG star. Most of the artists picked on IT’S ART have simply produced stunning artworks. They don’t see the site as a means to be famous. It’s a complementary sort of recognition.

You no longer host forums on your site. Why is that?

There are too many forums and discussion-based sites, and artists don’t have the time to spend all day on more than two places. Once they like one site it’s hard to attract them to another if you offer nothing new. So, I’ve slowly killed forums on IT’S ART, to focus on content and news. The most important aim is to provide a different take on news. It’s to be expected that people won’t discuss the news on my site if it’s exactly the same as on social networks or other websites. If you’re one of the first to deliver fresh quality content, people come back to your site and share it. That’s the content part sorted, in my opinion.

Finally, what’s your top tip for online success?

Share your work on as many websites as possible. If you only post in one or two, just because they’re the biggest, you have less chance of being noticed. The bigger a site, the harder it is to get noticed. It’s like with Facebook feeds: it’s hard to find sense in so much surrounding noise.