This is probably a pointless thing to get slightly annoyed about, but i get slightly annoyed whenever I see an artist’s drawing of some person they saw in public, and the replies immediately include… that one screenshot of a post about how good it is to draw art of people you saw in public instead of take photos of them

I don’t know where exactly the annoyance comes from.

Maybe just because someone ALWAYS posts that, and it’s getting annoying for me just from too much repetition

Maybe because i feel like as an artist I’d be insulted if the best thing someone could say about my art was “thank god it isn’t a photo”

Maybe because i am not at all certain that every person in these pictures would really find it less creepy to be drawn and shared around the internet than to be photographed and shared around the internet (even assuming the artist did draw from memory and didn’t draw from life, which would be an extremely personal thing to do to a stranger in a public place)

I’m not even sure I’d find it less creepy in their situation. A stranger who draws me is putting more of their time into thinking about how I look than a stranger who snaps a photo of me. And either one is doing it without my consent (unless, of course, they do ask permission, in which case there is no ethical difference between the two).

And if they put it on the Internet, the only difference is that the drawing is less likely to be recognizable, which I can’t see that much reason to care about. (if I’m out in public I know I’m already being recorded by cameras owned by all sorts of corporate assholes. i don’t trust any of them; what difference does it make if a bunch more people I might not trust see a photo of me. Most of them aren’t even in the same state, what are they gonna do. It’s like worrying about TikTok selling my data to China when every website in existence already sells my data to someone who’s actively fucking up the country i live in)