don't know who merjer is. i'm IP-banned from zeroping. anyway...
dramborleg has not produced any examples of hurtful criticism from this forum. this thread seemed to come out of the blue. thus, it appears he may be confusing constructive criticism with hurtful criticism.
please don't assume things, jenideandre. i don't call myself an artist. but i have studied with professional artists and have won national art medals. people like to think i'm an artist. now that you know i can back up my opinions... lol...
brilliant artists need criticism to grow. nobody starts out being the best artist in the world. it's correcting mistakes and experimenting that allows them to become better. criticism from others helps the artist recognize mistakes and form new ideas. picasso wouldn't have minded hearing there was too much blue in one of his paintings. he may have meant for there to be too much blue, so he would ignore the criticism. or perhaps he didn't realize the balance of colors was off, so he would fix it. pretty sure that in high school i did a paper on this.
here's a good example of a critique:
http://browse.deviantart.com/critiques/?offset=24#/d2c4xtp