Its accurate though. Thats what youre doing when you copy an anime face.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Is she copying an anime face, or is she making one up?
I don’t see any anime/manga for her to copy there.
If she’s creating new artwork in the anime style, then that isn’t “a memory” of someone else’s face – that’s just Mary’s personal style.
Also… I just defended Mary. I feel dirty. **shivers**
LeslieBean4shizzle
(to add some evidence to this, haven’t we seen Mary create many other anime characters in the dorm, including some based on actual people there? – I’m too lazy to look it up, but I seem to remember some little chibi drawings of her dorm mates at one point. If so – that’s original art work, not a copy)
Angie
I’m going to do a bad job explaining this but I’m gonna try my best
just because you’re drawing an anime face that you’ve made up yourself doesn’t mean you’re not drawing a face how someone else remembers a face. the idea is that instead of doing proper life studies to learn the anatomy of a face, then using that knowledge to stylize a face into something anime, she instead refuses to look at real life for her basis and instead only draws from knowledge of other anime styles.
that approach can have kind of an “insestuous” effect on your art. it takes the flaws of the artists you copy from and amplifies them, because you don’t have that base knowledge of real life anatomy to correct yourself with. ideally what any artist who seriously wants to go into art as a career would do is have a strong real life base while taking inspiration from many different artists with a variety of styles, even if you do just want to draw anime. Mary is caught up in a common pitfall of “I’m only interested in drawing anime so I will only draw anime”, which is fine if art is just a hobby, but not the greatest for an art class.
Terry
Very well put! And I agree with you completely. She is skipping the basics. Anime cartoons and even the characters in a single cartoon have a distinct difference in styles and features that set them apart from each other. If Mary is doing what you and Willis are implying, all of the people she draws probably have very similar looks to them. I’m inclined to believe this is the case since her current piece of art is slim while Malaya’s is more pudgy. Based on the teacher’s reaction, Malaya’s is probably the more accurate. If Mary was truly trying to convert what she is seeing into anime style, she should have made her drawing huskier. There are plenty of larger anime characters in existence, so it isn’t forbidden by the style. Instead, she is simply drawing a generic anime character with the correct hair style (maybe), hair color, skin color, and eye color.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Counterpoint:
I am no drawy person, but I did go through something similar.
I love romance novels and all their derivations (such as romance manga).
I particularly love fantasy romance novels (ie romance + magic).
Throughout highschool, undergrad, and (while less so) even occasionally in grad school, I had teachers – FUCKING TEACHERS – shitting on my writing because it was romance-related and telling me to get with that pretentious Iowa Writers crap.
And no, I was not just ‘parroting’ things back – I was deconstructing the genre and reconstructing it based on my own personal experiences. I was learning and developing a style while engaging with the genre that I love and care about most.
And I got treated to assholes like Malaya telling me how derivative and shit everything I wrote was not because of the quality of the writing but because of the genre I enjoyed writing in.
Can I write in other genres? Sure. But it’s BORING. I don’t like it. So whenever possible, I wrote fantasy romance (high, urban, historic – they’re all good).
I didn’t get any positive feedback from teachers until college, and even then only from one teacher, and only half-hearted because while she was okay with the fantasy elements, she still didn’t like the romance bent and tried to steer me away from it.
In gradschool, I finally met two more open-minded professors (one of whom introduced me to actual published LGBT romance novels, something I’d never seen before). But that was a long damn time of people being shitty to me.
And now I’m a published LGBT romance novelist and a professor of English, so –
**flips double birds at every teacher who shat on me**
Anyway, my point is that just because someone embraces a style does not mean that they aren’t using their experiences (such as a nude model) to hone and improve their ability. Again, I’m not a drawy person, so it IS possible that I’m missing some nuance here, but both Malaya and Mary had drawings in the same pose. It seemed to me that Mary was drawing the model – just in her own way.
I also want to point out that Malaya is NOT a reliable critic. Her entire characterization to this point is projecting her own insecurities onto others – ie calling Sal a “fake” when it is actually Malaya who feels like a fake. He critique of Mary may be just the same – not at all about Mary or her drawings but about Malaya and her issues with feeling disconnected from her own body.
Anyway, I’ve explained my own visceral reaction to this, so I’m gonna bail now. I don’t much like defending Mary, but in this, I feel for her. And I wish that my teachers had been half as supportive of me as hers is to her.
Sunny
I think if you want to put Mary’s and Malaya’s drawings in writing terms, then Malaya knows more and more different words than Mary and can put them together in more, and more interesting, ways. Hers might not be as refined since Mary has been writing for longer, but Mary has a certain repertoire of words and expressions and keeps putting them together in the same patterns over and over.
Going back to the drawings from last strip. Mary has put nearly no effort into the body, it’s just some flat lines and a bit of shadow on the neck. She instead focused on the idealized anime face (complete with blush and everything). Also, she has chopped off the fingers and is ignoring whatever the model is leaning his hand on.
Malaya hasn’t even tried to draw the face beyond determining where the nose is pointing and where the ear is. She has put a lot of shadows on the body giving it depth and volume. She also has a lot more lines than Mary. She has drawn thin lines that weren’t quite right but close enough, then gone back and drawn thicker lines in better places.
In writing terms, Malaya first writes a draft, then goes back and starts changing things and making them closer to where she wants it to be. Mary has one style of writing and just hammers it out never changing anything.
Angie
I’m extremely not a writer so my perspective on your point might not be the most insightful, this is just what I’ve picked up from people I follow who talk about writing.
my understanding is that romance tends to be frowned upon because of stereotypes like “it’s all fluff”, “it’s easy and anybody can do it”, “it’s basically porn for women” when that is far from the truth. there’s nothing wrong with writing romance and there’s nothing wrong with drawing anime. both anime style art and romance novels can be extremely well executed, and they aren’t inherently worse than any other genre/style.
what Mary is doing though is less similar to writing in a genre that has negative stereotypes attached to it, and more similar to refusing to learn things like metaphor, symbolism or how to make a piece thematically coherent. the purpose of life studies is to practice your basics so you can apply them to your art later. they’re not really meant to be fun or a way to express yourself, they’re the boring practice stuff you gotta do to improve your skills. even just the artwork shown in the last strip, you can see that Mary’s art is a lot more stiff, like a drawing of a plastic doll. the character doesn’t have any weight to it, which is something she would be able to learn and improve on through doing her life studies properly. then when she drew anime boys later, they would look a lot more life-like.
of course it’s 1000% true that there are art professors that will poopoo anime styles no matter what, even if the art is for personal enjoyment and is excellent on a technical level. that’s always super lame when you get a professor like that, but that’s not what’s happening here. if she was handing in an assignment that met all of the criteria and also happened to be in an anime style, that would be a different story.
but yes I’ll leave it at this too, I don’t wanna drag it out either
Doki
Yo, I just wanna say that it’s really awesome you’re a published author of LGBT stories. That’s super awesome and fuck every professor who didn’t give your work a chance because of that. Thank you so much for sticking with it, the world needs more of what you’re putting out there. I only recently discovered that there are actually a decently large variety of publisehd works out there about people like me and, not gonna lie, I cried a little in relief after a childhood filled with characters who were (assumed to be) cishet.
However, as someone who is very much both a visual artist AND a writer, Angie is 100% on the nose. Mary isn’t just drawing art with an anime bent, from what we’ve been shown she consistently draws anime art BADLY. There’s a huge difference there that, as someone who also once drew stiff and visually uninspired anime art too, I can see. She’s not in control of her stylization, she’s a slave to it, as I once was. That’s pretty different from you being genre-savvy and completely cognizant of what writing ‘rules’ you were breaking. Stylization isn’t the same as genre choice, it really is much closer to figuring out how to effectively use metaphors/similes. (Thank you again to Angie for making that comparison! It really is perfect. Drawing really is all about figuring out what visual metaphors are the best for communicating the subject matter to your audience.)
I don’t want you to feel any pressure to respond to this, though, I see and respect why you’re upset and drained by this conversation. I’ve seen plenty of people who shit on anime art without even considering that it could possibly be good – and some of my absolute favorite art ever is by someone whose stuff is unquestionably anime-styled, so it totally bothers me too! ;~; ‘Anime’ should not be used as a catch-all for bad art/media, but it often is. Not to mention that, uh, the vast majority of my characters are LGBT, so I get the struggles you’re talking about too (though my writing partner and I aren’t published, so we haven’t had to fight publishers yet directly haha). But, while Malaya may not be the most unbiased messenger… what she’s saying is painfully #relatable as an artist who went from hobbyist to more serious halfway through learning art.
Again, no pressure to respond, I don’t want to draw this out if you’re not feeling up to it. I just wanted to add the perspective of someone who actually does both drawing and writing, since no one else had yet in this thread.
abysswatcher1993
I may hate Mary, but I have been taking offense to everything Malaya has been saying for personal reasons. We are people, even if she reduces people to meat and bones like a Rick Sanchez edgelord. Even if Mary is not drawing realisticaly for the purpose of the class, I am highly triggered when other people accuse artists of drawing “anime style”. There are like hundreds of difefrent styles in anime, so I am horrible pissed when I hear comments like that.
John Smith
Hah, that’s funny. This is maybe the first thing Malaya has said that doesn’t make me hate her. People are important, but we’re still just minds in meat suits. That’s not “edgy,” it’s just basic materialism.
As for the art, get over yourself. I enjoy “anime” styles as much as anybody (spent the evening watching some, as a matter of fact) but what Mary is doing is textbook bad art practice. She’s not drawing the model, she’s drawing her internalized style. That’s exactly what you’re NOT supposed to be doing when learning to draw, and is a well-known impediment to getting better as an artist. That she doesn’t recognize that she’s doing it is a major flaw. Nobody cares who’s style she’s copying, that’s no the point.
Kabo
But she’s not saying that people are minds in meat suits. She’s saying we’re notpeople but minds in meat suits.
Positron
This is semantics. Her point is that while we think of a person by their physical form the actual entity that does all the experiencing of the world is the mind that’s currently occupying that body. There’s nothing particularly special or unique about any single person’s body, but their mind is a conscious entity capable of experience. She’s not denigrating people by acting like they’re worthless pieces of meat, she’s emphasising the mind over the physical vessel it happens to be carried by.
wwwhhattt
minds in meat suits isn‘t materialism though, it’s dualism．For materialism the meat suit is all there is, even if it can think
Clif
The minds are meat. The software isn’t.
Doki
I agree with you (regarding ‘anime style’ not being a monolith)… and also, unfortunately, have to disagree with you. I’m a huge proponent of artists drawing in whatever styles make them happy, so it really does pain me to say this! But…
As someone who, like Mary, started drawing with an anime-inspired bent, it’s been hard to unlearn those habits over the years. Thankfully I’ve been using photo references for the better part of ten years, so I’ve begun to take my art in a direction I feel is more nuanced than the art I poorly imitated as a kid, but… it’s still a struggle I’ve seen those who studied anatomy earlier bypass. I wish I’d learned to observe BEFORE actually jumping into drawing too much. Learning to draw and learning to see are two completely different skill sets.
To me, it’s definitely not about singling out anime as somehow lesser art – some of my favorite art is that of Shigenori Soejima, whose work for the Persona games would be unquestioningly recognized as anime. I also tend to strongly prefer at least slightly stylized art, so I’m not a snob who only likes realism (quite the opposite, I find most extremely realistic art pretty boring LOL). But when you do nothing but uncritically parrot another artist’s style, you aren’t learning WHY they stylized it a certain way. If you haven’t studied a variety of actual noses, and instead just copy specific angles of highly stylized noses, your ability to draw a more realistic nose if you ever do need to suffers.
And maybe you’ll never need to! It’s true that you can be a professional artist and not be very versatile. Or have a solid grasp on anatomy. But I think that’s what Malaya is getting at here, though of course in her characteristically antagonistic way: Malaya is actually analyzing what she’s given and mentally synthesizing it into something based on the source, while Mary is drawing the IDEA of a person. You can be incredibly successful as an artist by following that method, but I totally understand why Malaya is bringing up that critique in this environment specifically. Any other time, I’d agree it was rude, but… they’re in a class, ostensibly to learn.
I know a lot of art teachers have an inherent bias toward anime (but not American comics), and it sucks! I get it. :C But back when my drawings had an obvious anime inspiration, I had a figure drawing teacher who acted like theirs, and it didn’t help me grow as an artist at all.
Nymphie
It’s really what you do any time you practice drawing by drawing from a stylistic source instead of lifedrawing, regardless if it’s from a CGI series, a video game, an anime or a Disney movie.
If someone would practice drawing faces from these comics, they would essentially draw Willis’ memory of what a face looks like, not truly what a face looks like according to their own analysis.
Hmm. I’m noticing that a lot of people are pointing out a possible body dysphoria based on this comment. But she is absolutely correct from a life-model standpoint. Mary is drawing an idea of a person. Instead, she should be looking at the form in front of her. The point of a life model is to give artists a chance to see how the body is put together. To really be able to analyse it appropriately, you need to divorce yourself from preconceived notions and just draw what’s there. Look at the person in front of you, not as a person, but a sculpture of meat and bone. Then, you copy the lines of the sculpture.
If Mary has never drawn a turkey before, she would have to first find the form of what it is, then, once she has a good understanding of what makes a turkey what it is, convert it to an anime style. This would probably involve softening some lines and creating some new angles, but if it’s successful, it would be recognizable as both a turkey and an anime art style. It would probably be a great exercise to help Mary improve.
She is talking about the mind and body being entirely separate – about her mind puppeting a meat-sack, effectively. That implies both that she feels entirely separate from her body and that she assumes others feel as she does.
Combine this with the “Sal’s a faker – wait I’m also a faker” stuff from earlier and my read some serious body dysphoria.
Also, for reference, I may be using the wrong medical term. Not a doctor. I was taking the term “gender dysphora” – ie, feeling like you are in the wrong body – and extrapolating “body dysphora” – ie, feeling disconnected from one’s body. There may be a more correct term, so sorry if that caused confusion.
Sporky
I guess you’re right. What I was getting at is that part of what she’s saying is that people are minds and bodies, and there’s no such thing as a soul. Which I agree with, so maybe I just read it that way because it’s part of my worldview.
Knayt
There’s some dualism beyond the typical materialist position (the mind being housed in the brain which is also meat), but the general position of a brain being the more central component of self with the body a glorified meat vehicle? That’s pretty standard, and hardly edgy.
Plus, in the context of a figure drawing class the actual particulars of meat vehicle construction are pretty important to learning the basics of art. Stylization in any style is generally best added afterwards.
Ah – looks like some people already came up with more correct terms while I was typing that massive explanation.
Clif
I’m perfectly at home in my body, but I don’t think my body is really part of my identity. I remember when I was drafted towards the end of the Vietnam war and one of the first things they did was to give us a close haircut. For some of my long-haired friends it changed their conception of who they were. I didn’t understand that, and I still don’t. I’m me. Cut my hair off or grow it long and then put me in pigtails, whatever, it’s not going to change who I am. Put me in a body of the other sex and it may take me awhile to adjust to the new plumbing, but otherwise my identify is not changing a great deal. My body is not me. I’m used to my body and comfortable with it, though not happy about the fact that after 70 years it’s starting to wear out a little around the edges. Give me a chance to trade it in on a new model without harming someone (say by evicting them) and I’m definitely considering it. I don’t think minds piloting carcasses is all that we are, but otherwise, she’s not wrong. This isn’t Malaya being edgelordy, this is Malaya being helpful, albeit Malaya-style.
Only actual advice she’s giving here is that Mary is caught up in what she think human’s look like, which has been 18 years of seeing an object without analyzing it so you have some vague idea of the shapes without understanding the construction, and her drawing relies on everybody else also seeing these generic shapes and shortcuts to understand that it’s a human body they’re looking at.
But I don’t actually think Malaya understands herself that that was useful, her personal philosophy regarding bodies just happens to put her in a mindset that lets her advance at a faster rate in art because she doesn’t have a lot of bad habits to unlearn.
Her attitude is edgelordy and unhelpful. But she’s not wrong. To draw the human body well, you need to break it down and understand how it all goes together. You get much more realistic poses and proportions when you understand the skeleton and how the muscles overlay it and move, and how the skin behaves and where fat commonly distributes and, where applicable, how breasts actually look and move. It’s not uncommon to be assigned a series of studies of single body parts.
I agree. She may not be correct as to Mary’s internal process, but she’s obviously given it some thought, and has some insight. She has depths that have not been apparent before.
I am still wondering what anime’s Mary’s hyper Christian Parents let her watch
Sporky
This implies that they know she watches it
Lacuna
Superbook’s the obvious answer. Pokemon and Miyazaki movies are probably a safe bet.
Fruits Basket? Bleach? Fullmetal Alchemist? I’m just spitballing here.
(I could see Mary watching the stuff her parents wouldn’t approve of, but being all hypocritical about it.)
Doctor_Who
Miyazaki, that hippie?! With all his pacifism and environmentalism and movies about spirits and things?!
Actually, I kinda wonder if Mary’s parents aren’t super chill, and she’s the only right-winger in the family, sorta like Alex in Family Ties. Only worse because she’s Mary instead of Michael J Fox.
Marsh Maryrose
Could be. My mother had a friend who raised her daughter non-religiously. At 14, that daughter converted to an ultra traditionalist (Vatican II rejecting) Catholic faith.
That’s when my no-longer-religious mother decided to raise us as Unitarians.
Jamie
When I went through my fundamentalist phase, it wasn’t my parents’ fault. It wasn’t even my church’s fault. I was just taking the bones of what their beliefs were built on and pushing them to an extreme conclusion. There were plenty of people in my orbit that encouraged and enabled it, but it didn’t come from any kind of indoctrination. (That’s part of why it was so easy for me to leave that phase; it was my choice to go down that road, so it was my choice to leave it. I decided that I cared about people more than I cared about feeling intellectually superior about eschatology. Look, I was a teenager.)
Zatar
I feel like Willis said that this was the case a few years ago.
thejeff
Something to that effect.
Likely religious, but “super chill” by the standards of Joyce’s family.
King Daniel
Willis might’ve changed his mind (I know he has in the past regarding the subject of whether this universe’s Amber has half-siblings), but I believe he’s mentioned before that Mary’s parents are good people – and that Mary is just the sort of person who took all the wrong lessons to heart.
StClair
the true Anti-Joyce.
Zatar
And this is why you should read all the comments to make sure someone else hasn’t already said the same thing your saying but better. Oops.
237 thoughts on “Turkeys”
Ana Chronistic
headcanon: Mary is drawing the same anime man being mauled by the same anime mans
Electriccombines
Only they all have wolf ears and tails, like catgirl style.
brionl
But they have tiny mouths, so not all that much mauling.
3oranges
Or they could be humans given the skeletal proportions of a wolf, Satoshi Kawasaki style.
Jade
Why, oh why, did I decide to Google that? It’s like the Titans from Attack on Titan *shudder*
Tim
Those are amazing
Sunny
Agreed. I particularly liked the human with the skeletal structure of a flamingo.
Kamino Neko
Yay, now I’ve got a name to attach to that art.
Dean
It’s anime mans all the way down.
BBCC
Damn, Malaya, when did you get edgelordy?
LeslieBean4shizzle
Well, Malaya has implied that she doesn’t exactly feel comfortable in her own body before. This sounds like another run at that.
Other than the “someone else’s memory of a face” thing – THAT is just pretentious.
James
Pretentious but not incorrect.
Bunny
Its accurate though. Thats what youre doing when you copy an anime face.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Is she copying an anime face, or is she making one up?
I don’t see any anime/manga for her to copy there.
If she’s creating new artwork in the anime style, then that isn’t “a memory” of someone else’s face – that’s just Mary’s personal style.
Also… I just defended Mary. I feel dirty. **shivers**
LeslieBean4shizzle
(to add some evidence to this, haven’t we seen Mary create many other anime characters in the dorm, including some based on actual people there? – I’m too lazy to look it up, but I seem to remember some little chibi drawings of her dorm mates at one point. If so – that’s original art work, not a copy)
Angie
I’m going to do a bad job explaining this but I’m gonna try my best
just because you’re drawing an anime face that you’ve made up yourself doesn’t mean you’re not drawing a face how someone else remembers a face. the idea is that instead of doing proper life studies to learn the anatomy of a face, then using that knowledge to stylize a face into something anime, she instead refuses to look at real life for her basis and instead only draws from knowledge of other anime styles.
that approach can have kind of an “insestuous” effect on your art. it takes the flaws of the artists you copy from and amplifies them, because you don’t have that base knowledge of real life anatomy to correct yourself with. ideally what any artist who seriously wants to go into art as a career would do is have a strong real life base while taking inspiration from many different artists with a variety of styles, even if you do just want to draw anime. Mary is caught up in a common pitfall of “I’m only interested in drawing anime so I will only draw anime”, which is fine if art is just a hobby, but not the greatest for an art class.
Terry
Very well put! And I agree with you completely. She is skipping the basics. Anime cartoons and even the characters in a single cartoon have a distinct difference in styles and features that set them apart from each other. If Mary is doing what you and Willis are implying, all of the people she draws probably have very similar looks to them. I’m inclined to believe this is the case since her current piece of art is slim while Malaya’s is more pudgy. Based on the teacher’s reaction, Malaya’s is probably the more accurate. If Mary was truly trying to convert what she is seeing into anime style, she should have made her drawing huskier. There are plenty of larger anime characters in existence, so it isn’t forbidden by the style. Instead, she is simply drawing a generic anime character with the correct hair style (maybe), hair color, skin color, and eye color.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Counterpoint:
I am no drawy person, but I did go through something similar.
I love romance novels and all their derivations (such as romance manga).
I particularly love fantasy romance novels (ie romance + magic).
Throughout highschool, undergrad, and (while less so) even occasionally in grad school, I had teachers – FUCKING TEACHERS – shitting on my writing because it was romance-related and telling me to get with that pretentious Iowa Writers crap.
And no, I was not just ‘parroting’ things back – I was deconstructing the genre and reconstructing it based on my own personal experiences. I was learning and developing a style while engaging with the genre that I love and care about most.
And I got treated to assholes like Malaya telling me how derivative and shit everything I wrote was not because of the quality of the writing but because of the genre I enjoyed writing in.
Can I write in other genres? Sure. But it’s BORING. I don’t like it. So whenever possible, I wrote fantasy romance (high, urban, historic – they’re all good).
I didn’t get any positive feedback from teachers until college, and even then only from one teacher, and only half-hearted because while she was okay with the fantasy elements, she still didn’t like the romance bent and tried to steer me away from it.
In gradschool, I finally met two more open-minded professors (one of whom introduced me to actual published LGBT romance novels, something I’d never seen before). But that was a long damn time of people being shitty to me.
And now I’m a published LGBT romance novelist and a professor of English, so –
**flips double birds at every teacher who shat on me**
Anyway, my point is that just because someone embraces a style does not mean that they aren’t using their experiences (such as a nude model) to hone and improve their ability. Again, I’m not a drawy person, so it IS possible that I’m missing some nuance here, but both Malaya and Mary had drawings in the same pose. It seemed to me that Mary was drawing the model – just in her own way.
I also want to point out that Malaya is NOT a reliable critic. Her entire characterization to this point is projecting her own insecurities onto others – ie calling Sal a “fake” when it is actually Malaya who feels like a fake. He critique of Mary may be just the same – not at all about Mary or her drawings but about Malaya and her issues with feeling disconnected from her own body.
Anyway, I’ve explained my own visceral reaction to this, so I’m gonna bail now. I don’t much like defending Mary, but in this, I feel for her. And I wish that my teachers had been half as supportive of me as hers is to her.
Sunny
I think if you want to put Mary’s and Malaya’s drawings in writing terms, then Malaya knows more and more different words than Mary and can put them together in more, and more interesting, ways. Hers might not be as refined since Mary has been writing for longer, but Mary has a certain repertoire of words and expressions and keeps putting them together in the same patterns over and over.
Going back to the drawings from last strip. Mary has put nearly no effort into the body, it’s just some flat lines and a bit of shadow on the neck. She instead focused on the idealized anime face (complete with blush and everything). Also, she has chopped off the fingers and is ignoring whatever the model is leaning his hand on.
Malaya hasn’t even tried to draw the face beyond determining where the nose is pointing and where the ear is. She has put a lot of shadows on the body giving it depth and volume. She also has a lot more lines than Mary. She has drawn thin lines that weren’t quite right but close enough, then gone back and drawn thicker lines in better places.
In writing terms, Malaya first writes a draft, then goes back and starts changing things and making them closer to where she wants it to be. Mary has one style of writing and just hammers it out never changing anything.
Angie
I’m extremely not a writer so my perspective on your point might not be the most insightful, this is just what I’ve picked up from people I follow who talk about writing.
my understanding is that romance tends to be frowned upon because of stereotypes like “it’s all fluff”, “it’s easy and anybody can do it”, “it’s basically porn for women” when that is far from the truth. there’s nothing wrong with writing romance and there’s nothing wrong with drawing anime. both anime style art and romance novels can be extremely well executed, and they aren’t inherently worse than any other genre/style.
what Mary is doing though is less similar to writing in a genre that has negative stereotypes attached to it, and more similar to refusing to learn things like metaphor, symbolism or how to make a piece thematically coherent. the purpose of life studies is to practice your basics so you can apply them to your art later. they’re not really meant to be fun or a way to express yourself, they’re the boring practice stuff you gotta do to improve your skills. even just the artwork shown in the last strip, you can see that Mary’s art is a lot more stiff, like a drawing of a plastic doll. the character doesn’t have any weight to it, which is something she would be able to learn and improve on through doing her life studies properly. then when she drew anime boys later, they would look a lot more life-like.
of course it’s 1000% true that there are art professors that will poopoo anime styles no matter what, even if the art is for personal enjoyment and is excellent on a technical level. that’s always super lame when you get a professor like that, but that’s not what’s happening here. if she was handing in an assignment that met all of the criteria and also happened to be in an anime style, that would be a different story.
but yes I’ll leave it at this too, I don’t wanna drag it out either
Doki
Yo, I just wanna say that it’s really awesome you’re a published author of LGBT stories. That’s super awesome and fuck every professor who didn’t give your work a chance because of that. Thank you so much for sticking with it, the world needs more of what you’re putting out there. I only recently discovered that there are actually a decently large variety of publisehd works out there about people like me and, not gonna lie, I cried a little in relief after a childhood filled with characters who were (assumed to be) cishet.
However, as someone who is very much both a visual artist AND a writer, Angie is 100% on the nose. Mary isn’t just drawing art with an anime bent, from what we’ve been shown she consistently draws anime art BADLY. There’s a huge difference there that, as someone who also once drew stiff and visually uninspired anime art too, I can see. She’s not in control of her stylization, she’s a slave to it, as I once was. That’s pretty different from you being genre-savvy and completely cognizant of what writing ‘rules’ you were breaking. Stylization isn’t the same as genre choice, it really is much closer to figuring out how to effectively use metaphors/similes. (Thank you again to Angie for making that comparison! It really is perfect. Drawing really is all about figuring out what visual metaphors are the best for communicating the subject matter to your audience.)
I don’t want you to feel any pressure to respond to this, though, I see and respect why you’re upset and drained by this conversation. I’ve seen plenty of people who shit on anime art without even considering that it could possibly be good – and some of my absolute favorite art ever is by someone whose stuff is unquestionably anime-styled, so it totally bothers me too! ;~; ‘Anime’ should not be used as a catch-all for bad art/media, but it often is. Not to mention that, uh, the vast majority of my characters are LGBT, so I get the struggles you’re talking about too (though my writing partner and I aren’t published, so we haven’t had to fight publishers yet directly haha). But, while Malaya may not be the most unbiased messenger… what she’s saying is painfully #relatable as an artist who went from hobbyist to more serious halfway through learning art.
Again, no pressure to respond, I don’t want to draw this out if you’re not feeling up to it. I just wanted to add the perspective of someone who actually does both drawing and writing, since no one else had yet in this thread.
abysswatcher1993
I may hate Mary, but I have been taking offense to everything Malaya has been saying for personal reasons. We are people, even if she reduces people to meat and bones like a Rick Sanchez edgelord. Even if Mary is not drawing realisticaly for the purpose of the class, I am highly triggered when other people accuse artists of drawing “anime style”. There are like hundreds of difefrent styles in anime, so I am horrible pissed when I hear comments like that.
John Smith
Hah, that’s funny. This is maybe the first thing Malaya has said that doesn’t make me hate her. People are important, but we’re still just minds in meat suits. That’s not “edgy,” it’s just basic materialism.
As for the art, get over yourself. I enjoy “anime” styles as much as anybody (spent the evening watching some, as a matter of fact) but what Mary is doing is textbook bad art practice. She’s not drawing the model, she’s drawing her internalized style. That’s exactly what you’re NOT supposed to be doing when learning to draw, and is a well-known impediment to getting better as an artist. That she doesn’t recognize that she’s doing it is a major flaw. Nobody cares who’s style she’s copying, that’s no the point.
Kabo
But she’s not saying that people are minds in meat suits. She’s saying we’re notpeople but minds in meat suits.
Positron
This is semantics. Her point is that while we think of a person by their physical form the actual entity that does all the experiencing of the world is the mind that’s currently occupying that body. There’s nothing particularly special or unique about any single person’s body, but their mind is a conscious entity capable of experience. She’s not denigrating people by acting like they’re worthless pieces of meat, she’s emphasising the mind over the physical vessel it happens to be carried by.
wwwhhattt
minds in meat suits isn‘t materialism though, it’s dualism．For materialism the meat suit is all there is, even if it can think
Clif
The minds are meat. The software isn’t.
Doki
I agree with you (regarding ‘anime style’ not being a monolith)… and also, unfortunately, have to disagree with you. I’m a huge proponent of artists drawing in whatever styles make them happy, so it really does pain me to say this! But…
As someone who, like Mary, started drawing with an anime-inspired bent, it’s been hard to unlearn those habits over the years. Thankfully I’ve been using photo references for the better part of ten years, so I’ve begun to take my art in a direction I feel is more nuanced than the art I poorly imitated as a kid, but… it’s still a struggle I’ve seen those who studied anatomy earlier bypass. I wish I’d learned to observe BEFORE actually jumping into drawing too much. Learning to draw and learning to see are two completely different skill sets.
To me, it’s definitely not about singling out anime as somehow lesser art – some of my favorite art is that of Shigenori Soejima, whose work for the Persona games would be unquestioningly recognized as anime. I also tend to strongly prefer at least slightly stylized art, so I’m not a snob who only likes realism (quite the opposite, I find most extremely realistic art pretty boring LOL). But when you do nothing but uncritically parrot another artist’s style, you aren’t learning WHY they stylized it a certain way. If you haven’t studied a variety of actual noses, and instead just copy specific angles of highly stylized noses, your ability to draw a more realistic nose if you ever do need to suffers.
And maybe you’ll never need to! It’s true that you can be a professional artist and not be very versatile. Or have a solid grasp on anatomy. But I think that’s what Malaya is getting at here, though of course in her characteristically antagonistic way: Malaya is actually analyzing what she’s given and mentally synthesizing it into something based on the source, while Mary is drawing the IDEA of a person. You can be incredibly successful as an artist by following that method, but I totally understand why Malaya is bringing up that critique in this environment specifically. Any other time, I’d agree it was rude, but… they’re in a class, ostensibly to learn.
I know a lot of art teachers have an inherent bias toward anime (but not American comics), and it sucks! I get it. :C But back when my drawings had an obvious anime inspiration, I had a figure drawing teacher who acted like theirs, and it didn’t help me grow as an artist at all.
Nymphie
It’s really what you do any time you practice drawing by drawing from a stylistic source instead of lifedrawing, regardless if it’s from a CGI series, a video game, an anime or a Disney movie.
If someone would practice drawing faces from these comics, they would essentially draw Willis’ memory of what a face looks like, not truly what a face looks like according to their own analysis.
BBCC
Ooooh, nice catch! I hadn’t considered that angle.
Terry
Hmm. I’m noticing that a lot of people are pointing out a possible body dysphoria based on this comment. But she is absolutely correct from a life-model standpoint. Mary is drawing an idea of a person. Instead, she should be looking at the form in front of her. The point of a life model is to give artists a chance to see how the body is put together. To really be able to analyse it appropriately, you need to divorce yourself from preconceived notions and just draw what’s there. Look at the person in front of you, not as a person, but a sculpture of meat and bone. Then, you copy the lines of the sculpture.
If Mary has never drawn a turkey before, she would have to first find the form of what it is, then, once she has a good understanding of what makes a turkey what it is, convert it to an anime style. This would probably involve softening some lines and creating some new angles, but if it’s successful, it would be recognizable as both a turkey and an anime art style. It would probably be a great exercise to help Mary improve.
Durandal_1707
Damn, birds, when did you start flying?
Damn, dogs, when did you start barking?
Damn, cats, when did you start taking over the internet?
Clif
It’s the Internet; who can tell?
DSL
There’s an accuracy (not to mention substance) to Malaya’s comment that your average edgelord lacks.
Arianod
In the placenta, probably.
Zee
When was she ever not edgelordy?
Stephen Bierce
“The wolf was only trying to help!”–DUE SOUTH
ValdVin
Do you have a wolf license for it?
Luxshine
In all fairness, the wolf is deaf. So he might have misread the instructions.
He Who Abides
Oh. My. God.
I thought I made up Due South! I was all set to pitch it to a network and everything! Bless you, kind human!
LeslieBean4shizzle
Welp, that’s some Grade A body dysphoria right there.
Sporky
Is it? I thought it was more like philosophical physicalism.
jeffepp
More of a sexual fetish?
LeslieBean4shizzle
She is talking about the mind and body being entirely separate – about her mind puppeting a meat-sack, effectively. That implies both that she feels entirely separate from her body and that she assumes others feel as she does.
Combine this with the “Sal’s a faker – wait I’m also a faker” stuff from earlier and my read some serious body dysphoria.
Also, for reference, I may be using the wrong medical term. Not a doctor. I was taking the term “gender dysphora” – ie, feeling like you are in the wrong body – and extrapolating “body dysphora” – ie, feeling disconnected from one’s body. There may be a more correct term, so sorry if that caused confusion.
Sporky
I guess you’re right. What I was getting at is that part of what she’s saying is that people are minds and bodies, and there’s no such thing as a soul. Which I agree with, so maybe I just read it that way because it’s part of my worldview.
Knayt
There’s some dualism beyond the typical materialist position (the mind being housed in the brain which is also meat), but the general position of a brain being the more central component of self with the body a glorified meat vehicle? That’s pretty standard, and hardly edgy.
Plus, in the context of a figure drawing class the actual particulars of meat vehicle construction are pretty important to learning the basics of art. Stylization in any style is generally best added afterwards.
Nymphie
It sounds more like depersonalization to me, but could have been developed due to body dysphoria
chris2315
Jesus Christ, yeah. That’s dissociation. She thinks it’s normal for people to feel like their bodies aren’t really a part of their identity.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Ah – looks like some people already came up with more correct terms while I was typing that massive explanation.
Clif
I’m perfectly at home in my body, but I don’t think my body is really part of my identity. I remember when I was drafted towards the end of the Vietnam war and one of the first things they did was to give us a close haircut. For some of my long-haired friends it changed their conception of who they were. I didn’t understand that, and I still don’t. I’m me. Cut my hair off or grow it long and then put me in pigtails, whatever, it’s not going to change who I am. Put me in a body of the other sex and it may take me awhile to adjust to the new plumbing, but otherwise my identify is not changing a great deal. My body is not me. I’m used to my body and comfortable with it, though not happy about the fact that after 70 years it’s starting to wear out a little around the edges. Give me a chance to trade it in on a new model without harming someone (say by evicting them) and I’m definitely considering it. I don’t think minds piloting carcasses is all that we are, but otherwise, she’s not wrong. This isn’t Malaya being edgelordy, this is Malaya being helpful, albeit Malaya-style.
PHNX
In the immortal words of RUN-DMC (by way of The Monkees):
“Mary, Mary, Why ya buggin’?!”
foamy
I wouldn’t mind seeing the picture described by the alt-text.
Doctor_Who
We need to make “anime man wolves” the character in this month’s Patreon strip.
Marsh Maryrose
Mary does her best work in the service of spite.
Kyrik Michalowski
I honestly have no idea if Malaya is giving out good advice, spouting nonsense or just being an edgelord but if it pisses of Mary I’m all for it.
Mra
She is giving legitimate advice, but her motives are probably just to be an edgelord and burst Mary’s bubble
Nymphie
Only actual advice she’s giving here is that Mary is caught up in what she think human’s look like, which has been 18 years of seeing an object without analyzing it so you have some vague idea of the shapes without understanding the construction, and her drawing relies on everybody else also seeing these generic shapes and shortcuts to understand that it’s a human body they’re looking at.
But I don’t actually think Malaya understands herself that that was useful, her personal philosophy regarding bodies just happens to put her in a mindset that lets her advance at a faster rate in art because she doesn’t have a lot of bad habits to unlearn.
FairyGothMama
Her attitude is edgelordy and unhelpful. But she’s not wrong. To draw the human body well, you need to break it down and understand how it all goes together. You get much more realistic poses and proportions when you understand the skeleton and how the muscles overlay it and move, and how the skin behaves and where fat commonly distributes and, where applicable, how breasts actually look and move. It’s not uncommon to be assigned a series of studies of single body parts.
So Malaya’s not wrong. She’s just a jerk.
Nymphie
“You draw someone else’s memory of a face” is the sickest art-related burn I’ve heard
James
Right? That’s the kind of crit that’d make some people run crying and throw their sketchbook in the trash, there.
Bathymetheus
I agree. She may not be correct as to Mary’s internal process, but she’s obviously given it some thought, and has some insight. She has depths that have not been apparent before.
Dark
Careful, Malaya. You might end up cutting yourself on all that edge.
LeslieBean4shizzle
I would make a snarky comment about manga being literature, but it cuts too close to the actual comic.
Ah well.
Tea and cupcakes anyone?
Mra
I am still wondering what anime’s Mary’s hyper Christian Parents let her watch
Sporky
This implies that they know she watches it
Lacuna
Superbook’s the obvious answer. Pokemon and Miyazaki movies are probably a safe bet.
Fruits Basket? Bleach? Fullmetal Alchemist? I’m just spitballing here.
(I could see Mary watching the stuff her parents wouldn’t approve of, but being all hypocritical about it.)
Doctor_Who
Miyazaki, that hippie?! With all his pacifism and environmentalism and movies about spirits and things?!
Actually, I kinda wonder if Mary’s parents aren’t super chill, and she’s the only right-winger in the family, sorta like Alex in Family Ties. Only worse because she’s Mary instead of Michael J Fox.
Marsh Maryrose
Could be. My mother had a friend who raised her daughter non-religiously. At 14, that daughter converted to an ultra traditionalist (Vatican II rejecting) Catholic faith.
That’s when my no-longer-religious mother decided to raise us as Unitarians.
Jamie
When I went through my fundamentalist phase, it wasn’t my parents’ fault. It wasn’t even my church’s fault. I was just taking the bones of what their beliefs were built on and pushing them to an extreme conclusion. There were plenty of people in my orbit that encouraged and enabled it, but it didn’t come from any kind of indoctrination. (That’s part of why it was so easy for me to leave that phase; it was my choice to go down that road, so it was my choice to leave it. I decided that I cared about people more than I cared about feeling intellectually superior about eschatology. Look, I was a teenager.)
Zatar
I feel like Willis said that this was the case a few years ago.
thejeff
Something to that effect.
Likely religious, but “super chill” by the standards of Joyce’s family.
King Daniel
Willis might’ve changed his mind (I know he has in the past regarding the subject of whether this universe’s Amber has half-siblings), but I believe he’s mentioned before that Mary’s parents are good people – and that Mary is just the sort of person who took all the wrong lessons to heart.
StClair
the true Anti-Joyce.
Zatar
And this is why you should read all the comments to make sure someone else hasn’t already said the same thing your saying but better. Oops.