One of art styles that I initially thought of when forming this inquiry project was anime, or another form of cartoon style drawing.
A brief aside on anime:
While we often consider anime its own genre here in the west, there are actually many genres within anime (the term we use for Japanese animation), as it is more a medium for animation, rather than tied to a specific genre. Personally, I believe we should adopt this perspective of animation all together here in the west, as many times we see animated films and automatically assume they are for children, when really, it is just a creative medium to tell a story that can be as child friendly, or dark and serious as we want. If you want to see what I mean, look at the film Grave of the Fireflies from Studio Ghibli. Its incredibly haunting and not necessarily intended for children, but it is beautifully done in a way that a live action film from 1988 could have never done. But this is a conversation for another time…
I should also note the difference between anime and manga here. Anime refers to animation, while manga is the written form via comics or graphic novels. While anime is often vibrant and full of colour, manga is usually (but not always) in black and white. While both are stylistically similar, they are a different form of content. Osamu Tezuka (手塚 治虫) is often credited as the “father of Manga” inspiring the style that we see today in both manga and anime.
This week, I wanted to finally do the thing that inspired me and take the original photograph, and turn it into either an anime style scene, or something out of a Disney Princess movie. The trouble here was that there are just so many styles that fall into the category “cartoon” and I was indecisive in what I wanted to do, and I also have not really developed my own style around character drawing. So I really started by focusing on anime styles, looking at the way that many anime artists drew characters, and how they constructed face shapes, and particularity eye shapes and hair. Eye shapes varied, but had a lot of similar features. Whether sharp and angular, or large and rounded, they all had very large irises and think black pupils, with white highlights in various points of the pupils. I tried to mimic this as best I could, in a way that was easiest for me.
Rather than try and wing it though, I used this “how to draw” sketch posted by ariSemutz on Deviantart, which was really helpful for me, in guiding how I drew the body shape, head and eyes.
In the original photograph, my hair is curly. However, most anime styled hair is pin straight and angular, or, hair that is curled is very large, so this was an area that I had to take creative liberty and draw in a way that felt cartoony but also still true to the image. Had I done this differently, I think I would have actually made the hair a lot more dramatic and large, as this feels more true to the style than what I ended up with.
My biggest issue actually came down not to my own technique but rather the tools I had available for this. Initially I had wanted to use markers rather than coloured pencils for this drawing, but unfortunately I did not have access to the markers I wanted to use for the week, so pencil it was. I was also using a thick, watercolour paper. This paper, I learned, is not conducive for coloured pencil drawing, as there were thick ridges in the paper that meant I couldn’t really get a good blend, not matter how I tried. I used blending pencils and a heavy hand to colour in the singer in the image, but it was so time consuming and still did not reach the level of opacity that I wanted, so for the background I was much lazier and just did it quickly. In some ways it works, to help the character stand out, however, it does make the image look like a poorer quality than it could have been, and does take away from the stylistic goals I had. Lesson learned: use markers, or a flatter paper.
Without further ado, here is my image, inspired by anime.
As I now reflect on the drawing, I think its the one that I would like to keep working on the most, and apply what I have learned to another version of the same thing. Maybe next time I’ll actually acquire markers, or spend days working on the piece instead of hours. I think that would be fun.
To find my weekly reflections on this course and my learning, look Here
To find my other inquiry posts, look Here
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