I just saw this on someone's journal. It makes me happy, so I thought I'd share.


"You need to stop drawing anime.

This isn't something you have a choice in. If you are truly serious about your artistic improvement, you need to stop drawing anime. You can go back to it later once you've learned the basics, but until you have a firm grasp of anatomy, value/light, perspective, color theory, composition, etc. you are not ready to stylize in any capacity. Being an artist is fucking hard, and you cannot cut corners just because you don't want to spend time learning the boring things. Very few people want to actually draw photorealism, but you have to know how. Simplifying forms, in a way, is much, much harder than drawing things as they are."

The rest of it is here: [link]

I just. I wish more people realized this. I pushed myself to observe from life more and break out of my animu shell to begin with not because I hated anime or anything [I may have grown apart from the lol otaku person I once was, but I still love several series to pieces, and more manga than that] because I realized it was necessary to reach what I wanted. Not just an anime style, but ANY kind of stylization is a box that's keeping you in if you don't try to apply the laws of realism to it in order to learn. There's a very large difference between something being stylized, and something being, and looking, wrong. I have something that's more my own style than anything else, now, but I still have a lot of trouble with proportion and anatomy quite a lot of the time. And I set up all my figures as I would a real life model.

So. Yes. This is why Deviantart has always troubled me in how so many people seem to enjoy the plethora of digitally scribbled, lens flare-doused sparkly shiny animu copies of REAL ART and REAL CHARACTERS which people give a slight color/name change and call their ~~original characters~~. And then the people with real talent are either ignored utterly, or turn out to be flaming lolcows whose egos are constantly at the mercy of Anonymous, at least until they baww their eyes out and delete fucking everything.

So. yes.

Random thoughts.

I wish I had more time to draw things lately. I hate everything up here, pretty much. Have I mentioned that yet? Expect some kind of influx of artwork around. idk. Christmas or something. Whenever I can breathe.

...This song is one of a billion that suits Henri.