Day two day two! I'm not going to blog/post every day but right now I'm rooting around in my brain so you're getting a bit of what's in there.
I was thinking, today instead of just diving into artists I currently like and feel I want to extract something out of, I want to look back at the past.
It's not hard to find out who my first artist influence was. It's hard to think of any artist around my age range who wasn't inspired by them growing up. I'm sure they exist but I ain't talking about them!! I'm talking about Akira Toriyama!!!
The news of his death the other month was the first time a death like this actually hit me. I woke up and just cried, because, what else could you do? But my friend was visiting so I mainly moseyed around waking up with tears in my eye for a while lmao.
Dragon Ball (Mainly Z, DB itself aired like 5-6am here on saturdays during it's run so it was rare I caught it on tv) was like, the thing that I drew. It was what was important to me in elementary school!! One of my earliest memories is laying on my older sister's floor, copying a printed out picture of Goku's family as best as any 7 year old could on that thick printer paper that was connected and you'd peel off each other at the edges, while listening to the Vengaboys Boom Boom Boom. A big part of my internet habits as a child before the idea of online games or forums existd to me was going to the library and in the hour alloted to me finding Dragon Ball fansites where I could print off any cool looking official art I could find. There may of been fanart but I'm 99% sure it was almost entirely official art, at that point in time there was a lot of official illustrations!! GT was technically out at this point, I had a fansubbed VHS of the first four episodes after all!
Akira Toriyama is just, my foundation for existing. As of now I'm quite big on Dragon Quest but as a kid I had no idea the cool advertisement for Dragon Warrior 1&2 on the back of a magazine was one of his illustrations! That he was the main artist for video games too! Why would I even consider that, kids don't exactly spend a lot of time thinking about where cartoons come from.
My art, and aesthetics, lean towards simpler eyes. I enjoy drawing just pure black eyes, or ones of limited colour. I have a lot of trouble forcing myself to do anything fancier or softer with my eyes, but that's fine. It's just not what I grew up on honestly!
The stereotype of anime with big overly fancy sparkling eyes is very Sailor Moon centric, I believe. I enjoyed watching Sailor Moon but it was never something I had interest in drawing. Instead I copied the aforemented Dragon Ball Z art, where the fanciest eyes were on the girls and they weren't exactly overly drawn by any degree.
This was followed up by my second favorite artist of my childhood, and my introduction to manga in the 4th(5th?) grade, Rumiko Takahashi.
Manga was amazing!! Manga is still amazing!! I grew up watching and enjoying whatever anime that was on tv but I was a voracious reader. As an adult I still consume 10-20x more manga than I do anime. I'm just not particularly interested in watching anime outside of social situations anymore.
I copied a lot of Ranma art!! There's one cat picture in particular from an early chapter cover that I remember drawing in a huge brown/yellowy shitty sketchbook and being super proud of haha. I usually stuck to copying full body art that wasn't too weirdly posed. I wish I branched out more, but alas!
As you can tell, Rumiko Takahashi also utilized a simpler eye style. It has a bit more eyeshine on the inside, but it's still incredibly minimal.
I was big into her work for a long time, devouring anything I could get my hands on at the library. Inuyasha was a big one, as well as Mermaid Saga. The library didn't have many copies of Maison Ikkoku so it never really landed on my radar in any meaningful fashion, and it seemed way too down to earth to catch my chuuni attention.
Sesshomaru's design has always been something that has a home in a deep part of my brain. It's just incredibly appealing, a great mix of texture and empty space. Rumiko's love of giving men big fluffy pants that tuck in/taper at their ankles(DBZ did this as well for Goku's gi just not to this degree) was very appealing, especially as a shortcut for kids who can't draw very well lmaoo. IT'S GOOD SHAPES! MANGA IS FULL OF GOOD SHAPES! YA GOT BLACK, WHITE AND SCREEN TONES! THAT'S ALL I NEED TO BE HAPPY!
Now, the other pillar of my childhood artistic journey involved Clamp. Card Captors was amazing for me, I should watch/read it sometime since ya know, anime got quite jumbled by english distributors back then! I didn't draw much of the characters because it was a tv show and I enjoyed copying art, but my sister had a set of clow cards so that's where my experience laid.
Now, in Jr High I read X1999 and that's where I got to tackle overly detailed gorgeous art. The incredibly stranded hair, the huge ribbons that made no sense, the detailed feathery angels wings, oh those pages/illustrations were a feast! They were a challenge! It was so satisfying trying to tackle one of their pieces!
I've sadly read few of their works, disparate copies of manga at the library but my experience mainly lies with CCS and X1999. I really want to go back and read more of their works because their style and approach to writing sings to my soul. If you take anything from all of this it's that I want to go back to being a chuuni teenager hahaha. I want to free my soul from the shackles I've placed so firmly upon it!!!
There's probably others but I'd say these three are the pillars of my childhood soul. Obviously I liked a lot more stuff than this but it's like, okay throw pokemon/digimon in there I drew a lot of that BUT these are the core the baseline the essence.
Ok thanks bye.