Well one of the long awaited features of Steem is finally in an open beta. Communities are live at

https://beta.steemit.com/

Join Steem Artstation here

https://beta.steemit.com/trending/hive-156509

and I've kicked things off by starting my own art sharing Community "Steem Artstation". So I'm not quite going to make a huge manifesto post just yet, but as the title of this post suggests this will be a Community for "Serious Artists". Well what does that mean?

Well basically it means you're someone who takes art seriously. It's something you dedicate a large portion of your life to. Perhaps you've been paid to do it. Obviously if you're a professional, come right in, but I'm not trying to make it THAT exclusive.

If you are a complete novice this is probably not the place for you, but if you draw/paint/sculpt/3D Model etc regularly, if you're an art student with ambitions of going pro one day. Or if you're just a really passionate hobbyist you're welcome.

The focus is primarily on visual art. Digital or traditional doesn't matter. Here's a sampling of what I'd love to see.

• Illustration
• Fine Art
• Concept Art
• Comic Art
• Graphic Design
• Motion Design
• 2D Animation
• 3D Animation
• 3D Art

What about photography?

So I wouldn't turn away really artistic photography, but I imaging there will be lots of communities that are a better fit for that.

Community Goals

So my ultimate goal is to do as much as I personally can to help Steem help the world. That sounds grandiose, but I wouldn't be here investing this much time and my meager money into this unless I thought it could do just that. I think it will be incredibly interesting to see how Communities change the dynamic here and here's some of my ideas.

For Posters

I want this Community to mostly address two issues. Engagement and rewards. How well you do in these areas are largely dependent upon you, but I want to help by making this a place that makes it easy for curators to find quality content. I'll also be encouraging staking, voting on comments, and replying to people that comment on posts. That's the culture I want to push for.

I'm also thinking about a Community Curation trail to further help with rewards as well as that being a carrot for how I incentivise some of the behavior I want to promote. More on that in the future.

For Curators

I know a big problem with curation is finding content that's worthy as well as ensuring you're rewarding someone who isn't a plagiarist or something like that. I hope to do some of that work for you so that if you choose to curate this community, you can rest assured that the contributors have been vetted. I'll be devising a system with the "titles" feature to sort of act as a blue checkmark of sorts for users that are definitely legit.

For Consumers

I'm going to start right now in this post, but I'll be ramping up full blast once Communities is out of Beta onboarding professional artist friends and promising students to make this a community that attracts eyeballs from around the world. I'll hopefully be able to coax some that have fallen off to come back and give Steem a second try, but regardless, I'll be looking to make this a place for people around the world to come and be inspired and appreciate art from around the globe.

For Steem

As things evolve and get rolling the culture of this Community is going to be one of working towards being an asset to the Steem blockchain by, as I said attracting eyeballs from around the world and onboarding users that will contribute quality content to Steem. I'll also be looking to incentivise powering up by offering some incentives for those that choose to invest back into the Community.

Lastly as someone who's been here for a few years there are some users that I already know and am familiar with that I want to invite to subscribe and contribute to this community. This is in no particular order and if I don't list you here, it doesn't mean you're not invited, I'm doing this off the top of my head, so please don't get butt-hurt.

@veryspider
@scrawly
@adelair
@vermillionfox
@kommienezuspadt
@ryivhnn
@hiddenblade
@bryan-imhoff
@dunsky
@sanderjansenart
@adelepazani
@drwatson
@elenasteem
@elgeko
@francescomai
@zsolt.vidak
@samuel-earp-art

Some of these people's accounts have gone cold, but we'll see what happens. Again, I just listed the people I could think of or that are currently in my feed so this is in no way me saying YOU'RE not invited. Do you make cool art that doesn't suck? You're invited!

So hopefully that gets the ball rolling.

Want to help?

Subscribe to the community, engage with those who post, curate, make it a fun and inspiring place. That's all for now. I look forward to you all making cool Communities for me to join too!

https://beta.steemit.com/trending/hive-156509