The Strange World Of DeviantArt Bases

throughout history humans have discovered and dabbled in many different artistic mediums from cave painting to canvas painting to roof painting to pipe cleaner bug craft little did humankind know that all of these thousands of years of evolution and development were leading up to an event known as the peak of artistic achievement the launch of deviantart in the year 2000. there are many different kinds of art that have flourished on deviantart throughout the years but one of the most popular and prolific types are bases also known as draw over templates or pixel dolls from their fascinating history to their rise in popularity to all the drama and scuffles that they've caused throughout the years let's take a nostalgic look back at deviantart bases before we get into things i'd just like to give a huge thank you to caystify for sponsoring this video now i've actually worked with case to 5 before and i am so excited that they wanted to work together again because case defy cases are 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your order once again that's casedify.comy for 15 off your order the link will be in the description so let's first take a look at what bases actually are before you dive into their popularity and their history faces are essentially drawing templates designed in a way that you can trace over them or edit them in a digital art program to look however you want they generally look like a bunch of nude doll like anime figures set up in various poses though they come in many different varieties you can take a simple template base like this and turn it into this just by editing and drawing over the base artists will usually pick a popular cartoon or anime take a screenshot and then trace over the screenshot to create an accurate looking base and you can find bases for literally hundreds of shows and literally thousands of poses from the wide and varied selection of original bases to the hundreds and thousands of fandom bases for shows like winx club pokemon my little pony and more basses were and honestly still are incredibly popular on deviantart now usually i like to go quite in depth into the history and origins of the topics that i talk about and usually there are journals articles and write-ups about this but in this case there were no sources at all that i could find this made me excited because we're pioneering the field of deviantart based research but it also made me worried because well if i couldn't find any information on the topic it would be kind of hard to cover however swooping in to save the day was fellow garfield enthusiast at miss jackie art who linked me to an old deviantart journal titled i hate basses from 2009. this turned out to be the missing piece of the puzzle and the perfect lead and thanks to this journal i've been able to kind of figure out a rough history of deviantart bases so a huge thank you to jackie for sending that to me without that lead this video wouldn't be possible so let's return to this journal where big shocker various deviant users are discussing why they hate bases they were actually really controversial in the art community and caused a lot of drama but we'll get to that a little bit later on in this thread one user wrote in response to the original rant post quote the popularity of bases started with the popularity of kisakai dolls and pixel doll generators in the late 90s then those people realized that to make the electronic paper dolls they'd have to be able to do some coding or have some kind of talent so pixel dolls and bases became increasingly more popular they were cute and easily produced you could technically trace the origins of bases all the way back to the 1800s when paper dolls that you could cut out and dress up became popular children's toys but that would require over 200 years of history so let's just start with the aforementioned pixel dolls the kisakai set system or kiss was created in 1991 and allowed players to dress up virtual pixel dolls described as a cross between a computer game and a paper doll this was in a time before girls go games and online doll dress ups were popular or even well known so at the time it was pretty revolutionary and spawned many expansions spin-off copies and even a dedicated fan base of its own the topic of dress-up games and the pixel doll community of the 90s and 2000s is really fascinating and i do plan to cover it in a future video but for now what you need to know is that pixel doll makers were popular it was clear that internet users enjoyed customizing and dressing up virtual characters but for some these doll makers began to feel limiting and they wanted to expand into more original character creation thus spaces were born a sort of halfway point between the pre-programmed and designed pixel doll generators and fully original hand-drawn artwork while many people believe that bases originated in early 2000s anime forums due to the huge amount of traced anime bass art available online this poster's theory that they actually spawned from the pixel doll community is backed up by early records now for context deviantart is kind of a mess and despite being host to one of like the largest collections of art on the internet like evert it has no archive system and no way to catalogue or look through old art you can't search things by date range and you can't even search things by oldest to newest and even the wayback machine was turning up blanks so take this with a grain of salt but some of the earliest records i could find of bases being used were from pixel doll tutorials back then bass art was instead called pixeling and the earliest one i could find was a pixel shading tutorial from all the way back in 2004 by user called tsukinohukaru this may just look like a tutorial for pixel art in general but they specified that it's 4 pixel dolls and with over 63 000 views it was clearly very popular jeans tutorial was posted in november of 2006 and while the title is pretty self-explanatory the description contains an interesting little tidbit quote pretty simple select your base and erase the little copyright mark thing if it has one that way no one thinks that you stole someone else's doll most dollars mark their bases so people can remember where they got them and no one can say that they created it i don't remember where i got this one aside from revealing the artist as a scoundrel and a devious thief this actually tells us a lot about the early pixel doll community base artists were called dollars and much like modern day bases artists would edit them and draw pixel clothing accessories and hair over top while some clearly took inspiration from the anime styled kiss system others were more similar to the classic y2k dolls mania characters with more realistic proportions and magazine fashion model aesthetics i also learned from this post of dolling a common practice in the pixel doll community which involves combining bases together to create frankenstein-like hybrids these pixel dollars were so preoccupied with whether they could they didn't think about whether they should so the base community started off with these dainty little y2k pixel fashion dolls but how did it end up like it is today filled with my little pony and sonic bases well since the pixel doll community was heavily inspired if not started by the kiss system which was widely used by and associated with the anime community doling was always pretty heavily intertwined with anime one of the earliest anime styled examples i can find on deviantart is anime body bases by dewesky in early 2006 though like i said earlier it's really hard to find stuff on deviantart so it's likely that there are examples going back way further this base called base 36 by comics pixels in 2008 carries on this trend but the artist notes in the description that people are free to use it for kiss or doll link showing us that even in 2008 bases were still heavily associated with the pixel dolling community from there over the years the pixel doll community and the base community kind of split apart with bases becoming so popular that they basically overtook the website and pixel dolls kind of fading into obscurity pretty quickly artists began screenshoting their favorite anime from naruto to sailor moon to full middle alchemist and more artists would go out of their way to trace covers of both popular and obscure mangas and a lot of them became obsessed with trawling through books shows and art pieces to find perfect bass poses from group poses to couple and romance poses to action poses there were hundreds of thousands of basses for literally any situation and any style you could imagine artists quickly began branching out from anime into other cartoons and series one of the most popular by far was sonic with sonic basses finding huge popularity in the early to mid 2010s when sonic ocs were a really big thing for some reason winx club faces were super common too not only because the characters have that sort of fashion model look that a lot of artists like to design clothes for but because wink's ocs were really popular same with monster high bases the series sort of lends itself to original character creation so monster high bases of all kinds flooded in but as usual on my channel it all comes back to my little pony this is how i personally found out about faces as a dweeby little kid on deviantart and you have no idea how huge the my little pony base community was artists would categorically go through entire seasons screenshoting every key pose and creating bases for them so not only were they classic stock standard poses but incredibly intricate and highly specific poses as well it's actually pretty hilarious because i must have been really young around this time probably like 10 to 13ish and i had no idea what digital art even was like when i found out about what a drawing tablet was i couldn't even wrap my head around it so i had no idea how to even use a base i could use ms paint and a mouse really badly but i didn't understand how the bases worked so i would take lined like schoolbook paper and hold it up to the monitor and trace over it and like pin i was really proud of the pictures as well and i might actually still have them lying around so if i can find them i'll put a picture up on screen to show you guys anyway i did use other kinds of bases as a kid but mlp bases in particular hold a lot of fond memories for me of being a carefree kid on the internet that bittersweet nostalgia's hit and hard fellas there were also profile picture bases and a lot of you deviantart old timers will jump out of your seats when i put these on screen don't lie the side of these is making you have like a war flashback gun don't lie to me i can tell so yeah believe it or not animated basses were a thing too and while obviously they took a lot more time and skill to use they were ridiculously common with over 150 000 views and probably even more people using it considering it was frequently reposted the lick icon base by michi fisher was one of the most widely used bases on the entire site and maybe even the entire internet people would not only edit these to look like their own original characters but like other licensed characters too if you can think of a character there's probably a lick icon out there for it the dance icon base also by michi fishu under a different account was another widely used bass icon beloved by the masses for its embodiment of the xt lol random energy that was big at the time and to complete the trifecta of popular 2010's profile pictures you have the run run run base also by michi fisher under a different account and another different account holy crap i'm just realizing that my whole childhood was basically drawn by just one artist like i said pretty much every user had at least one of these bases at some point and whether it was edited to look like pikachu or rainbow dash or an original character they were all very cute on a side note this wasn't animated but a very common profile picture and page doll on deviantart was these little my little pony heart base characters i can't even like explain or elaborate just if you were in the fandom at the time you saw these everywhere and you know what i'm talking about but enough of all that nostalgia because it wasn't all rainbows and butterflies in the base community believe it or not there was a ton of drama and controversy that surrounded the community and bases in general so let's dive in so bases were a hot topic in the art community and when i say hot topic i really mean hot topic it was so hot topic it was practically wearing an invader zim hoodie in knee high converse art theft plagiarism and copying have always been sources of conflict in the art community there's always scuffles about who copied what and who traced this but it was particularly bad in the adoptable and based communities of the 2010s if you go to any base you'll likely see a big list of terms and conditions with the rule stating that you can't steal the base or pretend it's your own and you have to give the artist credit you know donut steal and all that these are very reasonable requests but as we saw earlier it was incredibly common for artists to blatantly go against this and steal bases without credit even going as far as to remove watermarks a lot of people would repost and circulate these uncredited bases or sometimes even try to pass them off as their own original artwork and artists pretending that they didn't use a base for their work when it was really obvious they did was a huge thing back then because of how rampant the theft and reposting was back then a lot of communities became hyper vigilant over copying and response leading to these ridiculous scuffles and infighting artists would literally accuse others of stealing or copying them if they made bases out of the same traced anime pose there would be arguments and many wars over which artists quote unquote owned the pose and artists were super defensive about the ownership of certain screenshots from shows it was truly bizarre to say the least dark community these days is getting better about crediting artists but unfortunately because of how many bases were carelessly reposted back then thousands of them including originals are floating around on google images and pinterest without proper credit to the artists while theft reposting and petty scuffles were fairly common the most prominent drama surrounding bases was the question of whether or not using them was quote-unquote cheating some sort bases is a way to improve their art and design skills while having fun while a vocal group of opposers argued that the bases were ugly lazy and were actively making deviantart and everyone who used it look bad as an example let's go back to that 2009 deviantart journal where users are discussing why they hate basses y'all know what basses are right shitty anime styled outlines weeaboos on the site let their friends fan characters all over same general idea as taking the most generic coloring book page you can find in giving whatever human figures in the frame a robot arm and a scribbled crayon background the things young wannabe mangakers use to ensure that their drawing talents never ever develop yeah i hate basses hate them hate them hate them hate them hate them and even more than the basses themselves i hate the people who use them the artist's comments either don't create the crappy bass or have a huge wall of text backstory to their super original oc followed by base by link somewhere at the bottom and then they keep saying how much they love to draw adding clothes in here to a base is not drawing my anatomy drawing skills are still pretty sucky but i would never degrade myself enough to scribble on a bass faces suck i don't really understand what mindset you have to be and to take pride in coloring over someone else's work that's already a hundred percent better than yours i understand that there are decent pixel artists and fun doll things and such but bases are a growing disease on deviantart and should not be permitted any longer i hate to sound so serious but i feel so strongly about it i'm definitely not the best artist in town but bases take integrity out of deviantart and this isn't just one random post picked out of the blue these kind of debates were frequent and heated with some defending their right to simply have fun and make art using bases and others calling them lazy unimaginative and even straight up theft this debate made its way onto youtube where videos either defending or decrying bases became fairly popular in the art and animation community a lot of artists during this time were literally called out because they were found out to be using bases and artists who were caught lying about using them were usually dragged pretty hard for a while it was seen as a really negative thing and a lot of young artists had this snobbish idea that you weren't a true artist if you used them it very much existed alongside the idea that using references was cheating and theft and now that i think about it deviantart actually ingrained a lot of really unhelpful and terrible ideas about art and to me at a young age there were a number of arguments against bases which i'm going to go over and refute because spoiler alert i actually really like them and genuinely think they're pretty cool i thought for this section of the video i'd shift into angry 2013 art commentator mode so without further ado let's dive in hi guys art drama commentary izzy here i know you guys all enjoyed my video last week about why sparkled bunnycare 8976 should die in a fire for tracing a pose from inuyasha but i'm here today to tell you guys the top three reasons why people hate bases don't forget to hit that subscribe button and add me on google plus let's go number one bases are lazy shortcuts that look ugly and don't count as real art if you browse through a few bases on google images you might be prone to believe this because a lot of kids did just slap them into ms paint and go wild as they should i would be prone to believe this as well if i hadn't been in the community as a kid and seen tons of genuinely gorgeous pieces of art made using bases i saw artists using these templates to create beautiful oc designs pieces with depth and texture and complexity and brilliant use of color and shape seeing all of this made me realize that basses are just like any other art medium they take practice to learn and master if you aren't already skilled at art bases won't magically make you better there are thousands of beautiful pieces out there that happen to be made using templates but that doesn't lessen the work that the artists put in or mean that they cheated as long as they credited the original base that's still a valid piece of art that took time and skill to make even the bases that are clumsily edited in ms paint and look very amateur like the ones that i used to make are cool pieces of art that someone spent time on if bases make it easier for a kid or someone with limited experience or ability to make art then we should encourage that because the world always needs more art number two bases are fifth now this argument is a little more complex than nuanced as i mentioned earlier art theft in the base community was really bad and it wasn't just people stealing and reposting uncredited bases but tracing original art and making them into bases from a 2011 deviant journal titled why i hate basses quote way too many bass users are disrespectful to the owner of a bass and forget to provide credit why does this bother me when i have no bases to provide because people steal my art and then think it's okay to make it into a base for their own character without permission or even credit in some artist's quest to find the perfect base they would literally steal original art from other artists on deviantart trace over it and then make them into bases which is a very big problem so this argument's pretty valid however when you see people calling bases theft and like a ranty deviantart journal they usually mean it in the sense that tracing over a black butler screencap is stealing from the animation studio or using my little pony screencaps from hasbro as copyright infringement this whole argument has been a thing in the art community for a long time but the general consensus is that if you credit where you got the art from and you're copying something published for tv or print by a studio it's fair game obviously if you copy an individual artist's original piece that's not cool but studios aren't going to lose any money if people trace adventure time or sailor moon screencaps and share them around as bases at least in my humble opinion as long as the source is credited making and using bases from popular media isn't theft and lastly number three they stagnate artistic development and make your art worse while it's true that relying on bases for all of your art won't teach you anatomy or shape language or depth or shading like life drawing or master studies would they're still a great starting point for budding artists a lot of beginners learn to draw like this using them almost as training wheels before they feel confident enough to start drawing characters themselves artists copy all the time whether they're tracing bases or trying to replicate an art style they like or using references for the art all of this is fine learning a complex skill like art is messy and this weird idea that you have to be this pure artist who develops their style and skill out of thin air without so much as looking at a reference or copying anything is really dumb like i said if you rely solely on bases to learn art you might find that eventually you hit a bit of a wall but that just means that you're ready to take the training wheels off and start doing your own thing and even then some people don't really care about their art skills and just want to use bases for fun casual artists exist and if someone enjoys using basses to make characters or play around with art without any intention to improve or learn anything that's fine too plus a lot of artists in the actual industry started off using templates like this when they were younger and that didn't stop them from becoming successful like i said bases are a medium like anything else they require time skill and effort and can be a great way for artists to dip their toes into the metaphorical pool of art or just a great way to make weird inflation sonic ocs you know either or that's going to be all for this video guys stay tuned for the next one where i dox a 13 year old and ran for 20 minutes about why animation memes suck hit that subscribe button and stay epic faces have come a long way since the pixel doling community of the 90s and even the anime screenshot era of the 2010s these days a lot of artists are creating specialized base packs which you can download or buy and load into an art program they come loaded with tons of different customization options traits and body parts that you can mix and match or just draw your own there are even entire character sheet bases so you can make your own detail character models and sheets the bases of today are a lot more accessible and easy to use plus there's more awareness about supporting and crediting the original artists don't get me wrong the classic mlp winx sonic and anime bases are still as popular as ever these days but it's cool to see artists branching out into original base creation with their own art styles and designs i think if anything has died off it's the popularity of the animated xd random profile picture but don't worry i plan to slowly and secretly orchestrate their rise to viral popularity in the coming years i know some people disagree with how i feel about bases which is fine because everyone's entitled to their own opinion and i know that there are certainly big problems and quite a lot of drama within the community maybe it's the nostalgia talking but i honestly love bass art whether it's the incredible beautiful and intricately designed pieces or the neon ms paint knockoff ocs it kind of sucks that the stigma exists around bases and even deviantart in general because i feel like a lot of criticism is just people making fun of kids for making art like i said the world needs more art and that includes badly recoloured total drama island ocs and ms paint anime girls so chase your dreams moral of the story is bases are cool and 2010's deviantart was wild thank you guys so much for watching i genuinely appreciate it hopefully you guys enjoyed that topic if you ever have any other suggestions for things you want me to cover definitely let me know below and let me know what you think about deviantart bases or any of your experiences on early deviantart because yeah it was uh it was wild so yeah i really hope that you guys enjoyed it and i really hope to see you in the next one bye thank you so much to my girl food overlords over on patreon xavier araujo tyson trivizonde the furby librarian sophie scatter simon simpson sheriff whiskey samsung account red myth palm missy pendragon lady cerebellum kimono my gyro jordan nielsen john leach joe bradshaw jesse chisholm helm hamburger hand grip gunderson finley dozo blind doug dana homegardner chicory charlie b brianna robinson boysenberry switchblade astron vortex arcantalis and genkofox and agaraphan thank you guys so much for supporting if you want to join these guys over on patreon the link will be in the description and yeah thank you guys so much as always for watching and i hope to see you in the next one bye

Channel: Izzzyzzz

Views: 1,567,440

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Id: AU1o5Krd3BE

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021