Introduction

The digital age has fundamentally changed the way audiences interact with artworks. When paintings are moved from the physical space of galleries to digital platforms such as YouTube, the way audiences engage with artworks has undergone a fundamental transformation. On digital platforms, audiences not only enter the works with aesthetic experiences but also bring along curiosity about the creative process, inquiries about technical details, and multi-dimensional evaluations of the artists themselves.

This article selects a YouTube video tutorial by the artist Maria Lebedeva, known professionally as Indie Ru, and comments to this video as the research object. It is crucial to clarify that «9 Tips for Beginner Artists» is the title of the video, not the painting itself. The painting featured in the video does not have a separate title. In the video, the artist demonstrates her creative process step by step and provides nine practical tips on how to paint an abstract artwork. Indie Ru is a Russian artist who currently resides in Montenegro. In her channel description, she describes herself as a full-time visual artist with two distinct directions: conceptual art, which she likens to “a knife I use to rummage in myself,” and healing, meditative abstract acrylic paintings meant to bring beauty and harmony to a space. Her style is modern, tactile, and deeply introspective, using unconventional materials to create textured dialogues. She holds a Certificate in Post-War Abstract Painting from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and shares her creative process on her YouTube channel.

The data come from a YouTube video in which Indie Ru demonstrates the creation of an abstract painting and provides nine practical tips for beginner artists. The video makes available three distinct elements: the visual process and the finished painting; the artist’s instructional text in the video description; and viewer comments below the video. The comments analyzed below are viewer reactions to this video, including evaluations of the demonstration, the artist’s tips, the modern abstract style, and the finished painting. The painting itself serves as the shared referent that both the artist’s rational guidance and the viewers’ emotive evaluations address. Therefore, the object of analysis is the interplay between the artist’s rational creative discourse and the audience’s evaluative reception, as manifested in the description text and comments. This study is a reception study of evaluative language, not a formalist art-historical analysis of the painting.

Theoretical Part

Expression of emotions in digital sphere interests scientists nowadays [3, 4, 5]. J. R. Martin and P. R. R. White systematically expounded the evaluation theory [4]. This theory is rooted in Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and aims to analyze how language expresses attitudes, constructs interpersonal relationships, and regulates emotional intensity. The Appraisal Theory consists of three subsystems: the attitude system, the engagement system, and the graduation system.

Within the attitude system, Martin and White distinguish three subcategories: Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. The core difference among these three lies in the evaluation target — what is being evaluated. Affect evaluates the speaker’s own emotional state. It concerns feelings and emotional reactions, categorized along dimensions such as happiness/unhappiness, security/insecurity, and satisfaction/dissatisfaction. [4]. Judgement evaluates other people’s behaviour or character according to social norms and ethical standards. It subdivides into social esteem (normality, capacity, tenacity) and social sanction (veracity, propriety). Appreciation evaluates things, processes, or abstract phenomena, including artworks, texts, and policies. It subdivides into reaction, composition, and valuation. Comments such as «Beautiful» or «Nice technique and great effect» evaluate the artwork itself rather than the viewer’s emotions or the artist’s character [4]. The distinction among these three subsystems can be summarized by the evaluation target: affect targets the speaker’s self; judgement targets other people; appreciation targets things.

M. Boler, Y.-J. Kweon, and M. N. Thresaigh proposed a multi-method approach called «Affective Discourse Analysis», specifically designed to track and code emotions on digital platforms [2]. Their core argument is that emotions are not the private property of the speaker, but are constructed by the audience in digital interactions.

M. Alcántara-Plá proposed a new framework for analyzing emotions in discourse. He states: Emotions are constructed by the recipients, not by the speaker or the discourse itself [1].

Materials and Methods

The primary data source is a YouTube video by Indie Ru titled «9 Tips for Beginner Artists» [6]. It must be emphasized that this title refers to the video tutorial, not the painting itself. In this video, the artist demonstrates her painting process and explains nine practical tips for beginners. The comments analyzed below are viewer reactions to this video, including evaluations of the demonstration, the artist’s tips, the modern abstract style, and the finished painting.

The video initially had over 500 viewer comments. After manually screening to remove duplicates, pure emoji responses, and semantically meaningless remarks, a total of 183 representative comments were selected as the emotive/evaluative corpus for analysis. The analysis does not examine the video’s visual editing or the painting’s formal elements directly. Instead, it examines how the artist’s rational guidance is received and re-evaluated by viewers through appraisal resources.

Analysis

The video provided by Indie Ru in the description section of the film is a highly rationalized and structurally rigorous text.

From the perspective of evaluation theory, these 9 tips belong to monogloss (single-speech) discourse, containing almost no emotional resources and hardly using graded resources. However, the 6th tip (“Make the color less childish and more refined”) and the 9th tip (“Make the signature part of the composition”) subtly reveal the artist’s self-positioning: rejection of childishness, pursuit of maturity, and fully integrating the “self” into the overall work. This highly rational creative logic sets specific expectations for the audience’s acceptance.

Furthermore, from a linguistic perspective, these 9 tips heavily rely on imperative sentences (e.g., «Start with»..., «Use the rule of»...). This creates a highly instructive and directive speech act. This rational, commanding tone forms a striking tension with the spontaneous, abstract nature of her painting process, which serves as the contextual background for the audience’s subsequent emotional evaluations. It is also worth noting the contrast between the artist’s written instruction and her spoken commentary. While the written tips are purely technical, the artist’s spoken narration in the video remains calm, professional, and devoid of excessive emotional expression. This «zero-degree emotion» in her oral delivery stands in sharp contrast to the explosive emotional projections found in the comment section, forming what can be described as an «emotional potential difference» that drives the audience’s subsequent evaluative language.

Among the 183 selected audience comments, which are reactions to the video, the artist’s demonstration, and the final painting, appreciation-related attitude resources accounted for the largest proportion. These comments typically offer brief but intense aesthetic evaluations of the artwork itself, such as “Beautiful”, “Gorgeous”, “Stunning”, “Wonderful”, “Fantastic”, and “Amazing”. The immediacy of these reactions reflects the viewers’ direct aesthetic experience of the painting.

Emotional resources constitute the second largest category. Many of these comments exhibit the «extension» mode described in the evaluation theory — emotional speech acts that expand from praising the work itself to personal emotional experiences. For example, @sourceactivation wrote: «This was such a beautiful piece that it made me cry. I just decided this year to try and learn how to paint. I have always been someone who thought they had no skill or talent. But I don’t want to reply that story anymore». This comment indicates that art reception has gone beyond simple aesthetic experience and transformed into the reconstruction of personal life narratives.

Judgmental resources accounted for the smallest proportion, mainly focusing on the audience’s evaluation of the artist’s ability, such as «You are so talented!» (@sandy Malone7554), «Super skilled artist and unique abstract work» (@mizanurrahman-mk5bo), «You are an extraordinary Artist of abstract painting» (@JacobMendozaArellano).

When the comments are further examined by evaluation target, the painting itself is the most frequently evaluated object, followed by material inquiries. Evaluations of the artist’s skill appear in a moderate number of comments, while evaluations of the artist’s body or appearance appear in a small but notable number of comments. Finally, comments that primarily express the viewer’s own emotional state account for a significant portion. This distribution confirms that the painting’s aesthetic qualities and unconventional materials are the primary anchors of viewer attention, while the artist’s physical appearance becomes a secondary and often critical point of evaluation.

A particularly notable finding is the high interweaving of appreciation resources and emotional resources in inquiries about materials (salt, sand). Many comments involve material issues, such as: «Hi Indie, what is the small particle you put on the canvas? Is it salt?» (@J06271984). Comment @sonalimazumdar_54 was particularly typical: «Stunning work. I had no idea that ink could create the same effect with salt on canvas». This indicates that the «salt» material produced a defamiliarizing effect, subverting the audience’s existing expectations of painting materials.

In the graduation system, the usage frequency of force resources is significantly higher than that of focus resources. Audiences enhance their emotional expression through lexical intensification (words like «amazing» and «absolutely stunning»), punctuation intensification (the extensive use of exclamation marks), repetition intensification (phrases like «SOOOO BEAUTIFUL», «Suuuuuper», «Coooollll»), and capitalization intensification (words like «WOW» and «LOVE THIS ONE!»). Focus resources are less common and mainly manifest as the use of «true» and «real» (such as «This is not a true abstract painting» by @shaunwassall7416). This distribution indicates that on digital platforms, audiences tend to express emotions by increasing intensity rather than by precisely defining the evaluation range. This is consistent with the immediacy and colloquial nature of digital comments — after quickly viewing a film, audiences tend to express emotional impacts using short and intense language.

From the perspective of the engagement system, the audience comments exhibit a significant feature of heterogloss (multiple voices). Many comments establish a dialogue relationship with the artist or other viewers by directly asking questions (such as «Is this your technique?!» or «What is unbleached white?» by @julieurlage1742, @FreshAcrylics, @SueHowie152), responding to others, and building a community (such as «As an abstract artist myself, I really enjoyed your tutorial»). These multi-voice discourses reflect the «dialogic expansion» described by Martin and White — commenters actively create dialogue spaces for other voices, making the comment area a multi-voiced interactive field [4].

In the judging resources, there is a group of comments that deserve special attention. These comments place the artist’s body at the center of the evaluation and confuse professional ability with external appearance: «Are you advertising your art skills or yourself? Everyone has legs... people are here for tutorials on art, not bodies» (@marygraydon6522), «Your leg pose in your thumb nail was the dumbest thing I have seen in a while. LOL» (@RickStoneSoloist).

From the perspective of evaluation theory, these comments belong to the «appropriateness» subclass in the judgment system — commenters make moral judgments on the artist’s behavior (cover selection). It is worth noting that these judgment resources do not target the art work, but the artist’s body. At the same time, other comments praise the artist’s body or feminine sensibility in an objectifying manner: «I see that you are a ballet dancer too».... (@botutu1). These comments, whether hostile or admiring, share a common feature: they shift the evaluative focus from the artwork to the artist’s physical appearance, revealing the dual dilemma faced by female artists on digital platforms.

The transmission of emotion from the artist to the audience is not a mechanical, one-way process but rather a dynamic interplay of multiple mechanisms. Material echoing is one clear pathway: the artist’s use of salt and sand directly triggers tactile curiosity in viewers, as seen in inquiries like «Is it salt?» Alongside this, technical amplification occurs when the artist’s imperative instructions such as «Use the rule of thirds» or «Make your signature part of the composition» are transformed into viewer praise like «Nice technique» and «Super skilled artist».

Furthermore, the multilingual nature of the comments (English, Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Japanese) reveals that this emotional resonance transcends linguistic boundaries. This cross-cultural resonance underscores the universal accessibility of the emotional dialogue initiated by the painting and the artist’s guidance.

Conclusion

This study, through a comparative analysis of the artist’s nine creative tips presented in the video and 183 selected viewer comments reacting to the video, the modern abstract style, and the finished painting, reveals the multifaceted nature of artistic reception on digital platforms. The evaluation of the artwork is predominantly appreciation-driven, with viewers prioritizing immediate aesthetic judgments of color, composition, and texture, while emotional projection remains a significant secondary force that allows personal narratives to intertwine with aesthetic experience. This dynamic is further amplified by the graduation system, where audiences rely on lexical intensification, punctuation, repetition, and capitalization to convey intensity rather than precise evaluation boundaries. In this process, material exploration emerges as a tactile anchor, bridging the artist’s rational creation with the viewer’s sensory imagination. However, this reception is not without friction. Critical comments frequently shift the evaluative focus from the artwork to the artist’s body and appearance, exposing the gendered scrutiny and platform economic logic that female creators must navigate. Ultimately, these findings provide an operational linguistic pathway for understanding artistic reception in the digital age, demonstrating that the comment section is not merely a space for aesthetic evaluation but a complex field where rational guidance, emotional resonance, and socio-cultural tensions intersect.

References:

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6. URL: https://youtu.be/OFNijNbBMhc; accessed: 01.09.2026