Hi there! Thanks for reading my article.

Regarding to your question, I was a concept artist for a while in Deviantart back in 2013. Digital art was fun! Colouring was my favorite thing to do. Most of the art community was so supportive of teaching us how to color better shades and lights, and how to draw human anatomies. Everyone were building each other up.

But of course, the tracers happened :/ There were times I found some people who did trace my arts and publish them as their own. But luckily, there were some of my supporters who noticed this and called them out. The safest thing to do is to have your signature or watermarks there to prevent 'save as'. That's why at first I actually supported NFTs....before they became a type of a Ponzi scheme and financial scammers art thieves just had to come again.

There are far amazing artists out there who made far better and high quality artworks, and they were able to support themselves by doing this.

As to how it will grow in value is hard thing to say since as you said, it's pretty much online. So 'save image' would totally happen as much as i hated it.

However, I can say is that most amazing artists would recreate their art with different styles and improve colourings, which makes the art harder to trace and its value increases. Some are also creating Youtube accounts to record their speed paints and patreon accounts to give exclusive art premiers. The good side to this is that the more one keeps drawing, the better they craft their arts.

An example of amazing digital artists who are making a living selling arts prints and create them that's difficult to trace are Sakimichan, Tincek Marincek, and RJ Palmer(Warner Bros hired him to help animate Detective PIkachu movie), who are digital artists. Their arts are very realistic and majestic and it's not easily traced due to the realistic colourings.

With that said, the only way digital artists could hope their art will grow in value is to create high quality art that's difficult for copycats to trace. Websites like Patreon helped limit the copy paste disaster. It's a great way for artists to grow in their talents and skills, and a more honest approach for now until they figure out a way to make NFTs a less kind of a darker business, because it's going in that direction and the gaming communities are actually mad about NFTs.

Sorry if it's too long, but I hope this answers your question.