empathy

Photoshop Yourself Pretty

In a recent e-mail exchange, Anna Hill shared with Artparasites the experience of going viral with her series of Photoshop mock ads. 

Anna Hill: The going viral experience has been both incredibly exciting and a little terrifying. Having 10 major media sources email me in a day is not something I ever expected to happen. Over the summer I posted a photo of my cat wearing costume elf ears to Reddit that briefly became a Star Trek meme (because they resembled Vulcan ears), got 10k+ shares on a Tumblr cat blog and shared by George Takei, and I thought THAT was incredible at the time.

This particular experience has forced me to think quickly about questions regarding my work. I've learned that things I say can be taken out of context, which I have no control over when thousands of people are reading it.  The exposure has been great, because mass exposure is one of the hardest things to achieve as an artist.

I'm really surprised my website has stayed strong through all the traffic, which literally went from 0 visits almost every day, to 20k one day after Yahoo's article was posted!  I guess I have to thank Squarespace for handling it all!

I have received so many supporting emails from all sorts of people, and they all make me smile every day. I've tried to not read too far into the negative comments, because 99% of them are more personally insulting and missing the point than constructive criticism. 

It also was amazing that South Park happened to air an episode on the subject 2 days after my Reddit post.  One comment on an article claimed I was unoriginal because South Park just did it, and I smiled at someone's response "this was done before the episode, you're just a jelly hater."

Article by Jovanny Varela-Ferreyra

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