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Whether you’re new to drawing lewd artwork, or a veteran of smut, you’ve probably already encountered one of the greatest challenges for a NSFW artist – finding social media platforms willing to host 18+ content! Building an audience online can be a daunting prospect for any creative, and lewd artists face an additional challenge when most platforms have their own limitations or conventions on hosting NSFW art.

Of all the many social media platforms available, it’s hard to ignore Facebook (or should I say, Meta) and their huge number of users via Instagram. Instagram is an incredibly popular destination for SFW comics, artists, and photographers, with over 500 million users daily in 2021. But Instagram also has stringent community guidelines, with a tendency to “strike first, ask questions later”, leading to a reputation among NSFW artists for being a completely inaccessible platform.

Instagram is a big potential platform for NSFW artists, but is it safe? Here are the potentials and pitfalls, and how to navigate them to reach a bigger audience on the platform. Click To Tweet

To avoid potential disappointment, I’ll say first: this article isn’t going to teach you a magic trick to hosting raw, uncensored NSFW on Instagram. I will, however, introduce you to techniques and strategies so that you can leverage one of the largest social media platforms to your advantage and grow your audience!

This is NSFW and Instagram – Pitfalls and Potentials!

Does Instagram Allow NSFW Art?

Firstly, let’s address the elephant in the room. Meta are constantly under scrutiny from users and governments alike to take more ownership over the content on their platforms, leading to some pretty strict policies enforced by both automated systems and human moderators alike. So if you want to upload content onto Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need to play by Meta’s rules.

An internet adage, adapted from an advertising philosophy from the 1970s, is that “if you’re not paying for the product, you become the product”. Remember that while you’re using free social media, these platforms need to monetize advertising space, which oftentimes means keeping things “clean”.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram (among others!) are invested in keeping their platform open and accessible to all potential users. This results in some restrictive moderation policies that value the health of the community over the needs of the individual. It’s here we find our first barrier to entry as a lewd artist – platforms that need to ensure underaged users are not exposed to adult content.

So, does Instagram allow NSFW art? Somewhat. 

The community guidelines for Meta (which are enforced identically on both Facebook and Instagram) explicitly prohibit a wide variety of sexual and erotic depictions. Although the guidelines allow nudity in real-world artwork, from personal and community experience, Instagram is much more likely to remove your content first and force you to justify your content’s artistic value within their guidelines (and even then, digital art tends to fall foul of their guidelines).

Yet all these restrictive guidelines haven’t stopped the absolute tsunami of horniness flooding Instagram. From Pixiv repost bots to legitimate artists, it doesn’t take long to find NSFW artwork on Instagram – although most of these accounts, particularly repost pages, tend to get taken down and respawn later on. For an artist building a brand, having to continually rebuild your community whenever Instagram bans your account is hardly the most efficient practice nor the best look, especially if you lose a coveted handle.

Given this, you might be wondering – what’s the point in trying?

Should a NSFW Artist Use Instagram?

The most tangible benefit to using Instagram is simply the access to such a large pool of users, many of whom may only use and interact with Facebook and Instagram, and might never find you on other services like Pixiv. If you’re interested in paying for advertising, Instagram also has excellent targeted ad services, a feature currently lacking in other NSFW-friendly social media like Twitter, Pixiv, and DeviantArt.

Besides having such a huge user base ready and waiting for you, Instagram also offers detailed insights into your audience reach and growth with their free Instagram Business tools. Compared to the rudimentary analytics offered by Twitter or Pixiv, Instagram allows you to drill down into individual posts and their impacts on your feed.

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In recent months, Instagram has forged ahead with more content types, such as Reels (their competitor to TikTok), which provides an excellent short-form video option for speedpaints, tutorials, or meme trends. Although Instagram may feel inaccessible, the potential audience waiting for you might make the effort worth your while.

Anyone I Know?

Here’s a few of my favourite artists, both small and large, that have created worthwhile places on Instagram – notice how their content is censored or SFW, alluding to NSFW content elsewhere. We’ll touch back on that in just a moment!

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@blimasfw – http://instagram.com/blimasfw 

@miraihikariart – http://instagram.com/miraihikariart 

@cynchii – http://instagram.com/cynchii 

@sciamano240 – http://instagram.com/sciamano240 

@reiqinstagram – http://instagram.com/reiqinstagram 

@ahabwick13 – http://instagram.com/ahabwick13 

These are just some of the names I know – there are plenty out there, with more NSFW artists learning the Instagram ropes every day.

How Can I Host NSFW Art on Instagram?

So, how can you grow an audience on Instagram as a NSFW artist?

Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, Instagram doesn’t allow depictions of sexual content, including more ‘vanilla’ content such as exposed nipples or boob-groping. The platform has a mixture of human reviewers and automated bots to scan your images and flag them for review, so you’ll want to be careful about how risky you go. 

The easiest and most effective way to circumvent Instagram’s policies is with simple censorship. Most of the lewd artists who use Instagram post their SFW variants here to grow an audience interested in their character design, and suggest that people follow their Twitter or Patreon to get access to the uncensored works.

How Could I Censor My Artwork?

You could:

• Create clothed and non-clothed variants of your drawing
• Tactically censor nipples or genitals with environment such as leaves or solid objects
• Use ‘anime-style’ clouds, fog/steam, or black bars
• Hide parts of the drawing with an eye-catching sticker or suggestive emoji
• Crop your artwork to show only the SFW portions

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These methods will get your content in front of audiences in a suggestive, but safe manner.

If you’re going to post speed-paint videos, keep in mind that you’ll need to censor the NSFW parts of the video too. A quick and easy utility I like to use for this is InShot, available on iOS and Android – not only does it allow you to format your content specifically for Instagram’s image size, it also offers free, easy-to-use video editing.

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What Else Can I Do?

Instagram is heavily invested in promoting their own tools and features, which means more exposure for you – and more potential to grow that audience.

You can use your Instagram Stories to market your upcoming posts, WIPs, events, and reels. You can participate in share-for-shares with your fellow artists, or simply give shout-outs to artwork you love. Instagram’s art community is vibrant and eagerly invested in helping each other out, with fun memes (like drawing something with just your finger in stories), or “DTIYS” (Do This In Your Style) challenges where you recreate somebody’s artwork in your own style to win a small prize.

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Approach Instagram not specifically as a NSFW artist, but instead as an artist who makes NSFW content – and you will find a burgeoning community of like-minded individuals ready to support you in your creative ventures, all while staying on the good side of Instagram’s guidelines!

Dangers of NSFW Art on Instagram

With all that said, Instagram is still a very different beast to social media like Twitter, or art platforms like Pixiv and DeviantArt. Like most places on the internet, there are certain unwritten rules that the community has formed around itself, not to mention the difficulties of maintaining popularity on an algorithm-driven platform such as Instagram.

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This article isn’t the right place to discuss all the various ways the Instagram algorithm works for, and against, your account – but in general, here are some broad tips for working with Instagram:

Do:

• Engage with other users via post comments, story shares, and reel comments
• Create short videos on reels (this could be speedpaints, before/afters, or memes)
• Write valuable content in your post descriptions
• Stay up-to-date on the trending memes and try creating your own!

Don’t:

• Repetitively use hashtags – mix it up a little
• Leave the platform alone – Instagram rewards active users
• Use offensive or explicit language in your comments
• Ignore successive breaches of guidelines – change what you’re posting!

Also note that the Instagram art community doesn’t look favorably upon loli/shota art, particularly if you’re adapting popular characters from media franchises or big games. Remember that your time on Instagram is all about building up a new audience, and that this new audience might have different tastes to the audience you’ve cultivated on other social media platforms.

If you follow the do’s and don’ts above, you’ll be well on your way to making a successful Instagram account for your (newly disguised) NSFW art!

Outro

When it comes to finding a primary home for your NSFW art content, Instagram definitely isn’t a suitable ‘Number One’ platform. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it entirely! 

Instagram can still be an incredibly supportive community and a valuable audience for your artwork, as long as you know the right way to work with Instagram’s community guidelines, and how to interact with fellow artists on the platform.

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If you’ve used Instagram before for NSFW art, we’d love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below. Has this article made you think differently about getting started as an artist in the Instagram community?

Thank you for reading, and thank you to Beats for having me here today!

My name is Brettles (@brettles_art), and I’m an ecchi artist and freelance writer. You can follow my works on Twitter (@brettles_art) or Instagram (@brettles_art)!