Cothswoller has been a long time face around my feed for a few years now, but when the pandemic hit they truly begun their ascent into the NSFW halls. I caught up with Coth and we discussed the current state of trying to find a friendly place to post lewds, as well as what newbie artists should be mindful of when building  their audience.

How long have you been lewding!

I started off my Cothswoller art career back about 2 years ago.

the quarantine drove me a bit bonkers, so I started commissioning artists, and that led to the slow gradual build up of actually drawing smut. I had been doing some minor nsfw stuff before that, mostly edits and coloring.

I have one ancient awful color job knocking around on paheal.rule34 if anyone can manage to find it. It doesn’t have my name on it, so I dare anyone to even try.

Here’s an example of a color I did before I started drawing stuff myself.

Awesome example!

The original artist is Detnox, a great artist who was kind enough to let me color it.

But yeah, it was a really slow build up over the course of months before I actually started draw anything myself. And even after drawing those bulges there were times where I didn’t draw for like a month

That’s a real interesting transition, did you draw SFW stuff prior to this?

Not long term. I used to draw a lot in high school, but after that it was tough finding the energy/motivation to do it.

And now you’ve really caught the bug!

Oh for sure.

Did you find that colouring peoples stuff helped with exposure at all?

the SFW stuff I colored? Never. I never posted that stuff anywhere that had my name on it. But the nsfw stuff did get me a lot of views, especially the Detnox stuff I colored

How are you taking this Twitter bullshit going down at the moment? Do you forsee yourself getting premium just to stop from sinking in the algorithm?

It’s not something I’m really interested in doing, but I might have to if the site goes to shit. Twitter is the site I have that has the biggest audience, and it’s hard finding sites that allows the stuff I want to draw. With all the changes being done to Twitter, even that might be on the chopping block. So in the end I don’t know.

I’m already in the process of having my stuff on multiple websites just to make sure I don’t disappear if Twitter just dies. That’s such a big issue after the tumblr porn purge, where I had so many artists I followed, and some just disappeared before they had other sites people could find. There are also plenty of artists that couldn’t build up the popularity they had on tumblr again on Twitter, even after all these years.

It helps that I chose a name that only returns my stuff on google

Yeah, my growth slowed when I got to Twitter. Where else are you diversifying?

Pixiv and Baraag are two sites I’ve been trying to get into. But pixiv requires censorship since it’s a Japanese site, and baraag is a niche fetish site with a small audience.

Itaku was initially promising, but it has some really strict rules about what you can post there, so its not the perfect solution for me.

Baraag is built on Mastadon, so I feel like there’s gotta be a more generalised group on there that would have the numbers

True, even if it’s a website where I can’t post everything I draw, it would be good to have a foothold on there.

Though the act of breaking up what I can draw is just annoying, since there are so many edge cases.

What would you tell someone thinking about diving into drawing NSFW?

Patience is very important. Don’t expect immediate popularity from posting smut on the internet. That’s a misconception. It still takes work and effort and a bit of luck to do it. You can’t get upset just because one piece of work doesn’t do the numbers you wanted it to. It’s super important that the act of drawing brings you as much joy as finishing it and posting it. Your first work probably isn’t going to get too much traffic, nor your second one, but as long as you’re learning from each work, and enjoying the act of drawing, (and re-posting your porn to websites with robust tagging systems) you’ll get an audience eventually.

It’s also important that you draw what you want, even if you aren’t drawing popular kinks. Drawing what’s hot and what’s popular will get you more popularity, but if its too far from the stuff you want to draw, then you’re really going to burn out. Or even worse, you build up an audience that isn’t looking for the kind of porn you actually want to draw.

Great advice. One more thing, where do you want people to follow you?

I got my twitter, pixiv, and baraag.