Was feeling a little gloomy today, due to some serious financial problems that've been hanting me...relentlessly.
[lack of] Money aside, I somehow managed to draw a bit this morning earlier today, sometime around 6:30, 7 a.m.
This is my first attempt at a real, live production still and animation cell style sketch. (aka "genga/douga" as they call them in Japan.)
I realized recently my drawings don't have that full composition feeling to them, or a greater sense of storytelling or full scale fully rendered detail.
I realize my bad habits have been taking my style over, and no one had the heart to tell me directly...
So when I realize the mistakes of recent art, I decided I can tell myself...
Now that I'm aware, I've entered a process of corrective drawing to teach myself to sketch and draw in fuller compositions and richer detail. Closer to the way anime animators and directors over in Japan draw individual animation cells, which is how you draw an anime co production...if you're into that sort of thing.
Production sketches for an anime HAVE TO Look full and three dimensional and have a sense of composition. They HAVE to, or it won't LOOK LIKE an anime...
That's the secret truth about anime and animation a lot of people who don't work in anime (like myself in the past) don't realize. If you want to be the guy behind the drawings on your TV or YouTube or DVD Screen, you have to....it's a necessity that you produce drawings, high quality work that LOOKS like what we Actually See On Screen, NOT an Approximation or abstracted interpretation of it. It has to be in EXACT PROPORTION to the animation cells of your show themselves. This is achieved by thinking like an animator. Get inside the animator's head, and produce something that LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE a Genga. Nothing less. "Less than that" used to be all I ever did. But I've made the decision I want to improve, even now after all my success with the arts. I want to take it and push it even further...and taking things to a higher degree is ALWAYS POSSIBLE, if you Try Hard Enough.
That's right kiddies! Ya called my bluff.
As some of you might have guessed or figured out, Production IG's Dead Leaves is one of my favorite films of all time, and Retro is one of my favorite anime characters of all time. So straight out of Tex Avery on crack I love it! I wasn't WATCHING Dead Leaves when drawing. I normally do not except sometimes, but the film and its animators left a STRONG impression on me, and the spirit of that film permeates much of my more extreme designs. Well, that and Yasuhiro Nightow's artwork. It's hard to explain in great literary detail, even though I specialize in it. That charmingly eccentric and bizzare, funky Rob Schrab and Hewlett like squash and stretch geometric angularity. That feeling like it's Leonardo Da Vinci or Todd McFarlane trying to emulate a Dr. Seuss children's book in animation form or something. That type of thing takes skill to make appealing, too.
The thing about Dead Leaves, and why it's an incredibly ingenious but underrated film? It's the cover. The cover does NOT do the film justice. Instead of doing the artwork justice by maintaining its integrity by going with a cell freeze (aka Ghost in the Shell), Production IG and Manga entertainment went with a crappily drawn "re-interpretation" of the films artwork. Now if Jamie Hewlett Himself (one of the films Western influences, clearly) drew that cover, THAT I could understand, but after seeing the film in its authenticity, it's just now that I realize some anime DVD covers suck compared to the interior artwork, hence misleading a lot of people to not bother with that. That or not be aware of what the film itself looks like in reality. I don't know who drew that cover, but it SUCKS. You MUST watch the film itself and not judge it by its cover the same way one would judge Ghost by its cover, something a bit more reasonable.
Also, if you want to draw authentic anime, do not draw manga or illustrations. Probably the truest form of anime is genga cells. You're better off copying from Genga cells or drawing re-interpretations of Genga than you are drawing manga if you want to work in Japanese animation. That's kind of what I think of anime nowadays. I wish there was more genga online, genga galleries and whatnot, but there's a surprising drought of it, and most of it is only available in doujinshi artbook format, with rare pro exceptions available on Amazon America.
