A bit about manga, phillestines and art

Those who claim that the Japanese manga art direction is not real art, lazy and what not are filthy pillestines. Anyone that has ever dabbled in comics and have had proper art education, knows how much effort it takes. In order to draw a comic several things is needed.
Such as a story, or some sort of joke. These are not very easy and only a few people can keep it up.

The next step is interesting characters, whom can play of each other. Or just borrow the generic japanese stereotypes. You know red hair for temper, while blue hair is cold, emotionless and chill.

Then the character needs an unique look, everything from eyes, to hair, color, clothes and accessories is important. Hell eve  school uniforms are somewhat customized in manga and anime. But school related everything, or sport sure is a time saver. Besides they say write what you know. Probably why almost all anime schools look practically identical.

Have you gotten past the previous steps? Excellent.

First the story board has to be sketched out, unless it's two people just standing still and pretty much everything is just clever, or not so clever dialogue. The newspaper approach is prettymuch just copy paste and requires carry little actuall effort to do. Yes a story needs to flow, and once the story board has been jotted down, the next step starts.

Planning the panel layout and sketching all the detail into the panels, while also keeping dialogue in mind.

Then comes inking, be it digital or traditional. An arcane skill that takes decades to master and a steady hand to apply.

By now I forgot to actually make sure the characters look consistent and anatomically correct in every single frame.

Did I mention coloring, that is fairly optional. Most japanese artist use tones most cases, instead of crosshatching, or a mix of both. Yet another skill to take into consideration.

Yes, making any kind of comic, regardless of style and country is a time consuming process. Anyhow, back to my main point of this random ramblig rant.  There exist an artistic elite out there, one which loathe the Japanese art style most of us prefer to as anime, or manga. Words which means cartoons and comic in Japanese. Everything can and will be labeled, then put in nice boxes after all.

The biggest gripe these art critics have from the general look of things is the unrealistic faces. Yes most manga faces is a highly stylized take on a human boxing. Let's face it, many popular characters from the east are  drawn with concave eyes. Lenses that somehow bends inwards. Which opens up another can of worms. Since I have no idea how these creatures sees the world. If they can se anything at all that is. The hair is also a dead ringer and breaks the rules of reality, due to the practicality of keeping it consistent and stylish.

Once a person gets past the face, they will hopefully notice that practically every professional artist drawing manage and animating anime, has studied human anatomy and mostly follows the traditional rules. Yes, practically every anime human is anatomically correct and is mostly kept consistent throughout the story. Boobs is the exception to the rules though, but even those can be sensible at times. It's quite impressive that most artist does this every day and somehow makes around thirteen pages every week. I'm proud if I can do one each week, and even then I want to burn the paper. So as far as Asian artist go, they are exceptionally skilled at what they do, more than most art teachers and critics are.

Now, if the idea is to draw still art and a kid is preoccupy drawing badly made Yaoi ar the back of the classroom. Getting g angry and demeaning is not the way to go. Encouragement works better, along with positive criticism. Put it this way,a skilled japanese artist will find the best reference pictures possible of whatever that has to be drawn, then replicate it to the best of the artist ability. The trick is to the get the anime obsessed child in the class to be that dedicated at conveying what the person sees, instead of using the unreliable human memory.

http://shardworld.home.blog

Zaceron signing out