If it is one type of person I hate on dA, it is the person whose ego is bigger than their ass and as fragile as wet toilet paper and no real skills to back them up.

To all those people, who get snarky at other people who critique their work without sugar coating it -- get over yourselves. If you cannot separate blatant trolling/flaming and a blunt criticism, its -your- problem. Stop throwing a hissy fit like a spoilt brat and grow up. As my professor says "Take a spoonful of cement and harden the fuck up." Straight to the point with no bullshit.

Do I sound mean? I'm just a bit bothered by people i find that cover their ears and stick their heads in the sand because they don't like hearing anything negative about their work -- they'll only accept messages with a HEAP SPOON OF SUGAR dumped all over it. I'm sorry, but it does not matter how long or how hard you've worked on your piece, if it looks bad in the end -- IT LOOKS BAD IN THE END. You, the person with terrible art, who claims they worked hard on their work, are you implying that people whose work looks fundamentally sound DIDN'T work just as hard to get their piece to where it is? This is why I can't take most people on deviantART seriously. :< -- A lot of the time, it just feels like that, as a child, they weren't praised enough or hugged enough by their parents so they seek attention here. *SAD FACE*


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I FEEL THE NEED FOR THIS TO BE SPREAD AROUND.

Taken straight from [link]

Also, note, before you get all butthurt (...hehehe) over it, because the first line is "You need to stop drawing anime." Read it the whole way through -- because it doesn't say to stop drawing anime FOREVER, and it's not saying anime is dumb and a waste of time. Now breathe, stay calm... and read it with an open mind.

You need to stop drawing anime.

This isn't something you have a choice in. If you are truly serious about your artistic improvement, you need to stop drawing anime. You can go back to it later once you've learned the basics, but until you have a firm grasp of anatomy, value/light, perspective, color theory, composition, etc. you are not ready to stylize in any capacity. Being an artist is fucking hard, and you cannot cut corners just because you don't want to spend time learning the boring things. Very few people want to actually draw photorealism, but you have to know how. Simplifying forms, in a way, is much, much harder than drawing things as they are.

Realism is not a style, but a foundation upon which all other art forms are based. Every truly successful artist learned to draw from life before he stylized his artwork. Even abstraction is grounded in life (albeit further removed than some other forms); an abstract artist still needs to know how to use symbols to connote feelings and represent complex forms. He has to know what a real person looks like to be able to create a symbol which registers as "human" to the viewer. He has to know how colors and shapes and their arrangement subtly affect the human mind in order to invoke the desired emotion within the painting. All of these things apply to anime/manga artists as well.

A realistic painter, an abstract artist and a mangaka (I feel gay saying this but I don't want to repeat "___ artist" again) all draw the same thing: the human form. Each artist does so in a different manner, but fundamentally, they are representing the same exact thing. Each of these artists learn, or at least should learn, how to draw the human form in the same way -- they start with what they see, and only after that has been mastered do they move onto exaggerating and altering the anatomy and form in favor of something more aethestically pleasing or appropriate for the piece's mood and context. You cannot start drawing things stylized to begin with, or your learnings are fundamentally flawed from the beginning; instead of consciously stylizing things in a way to make them more appealing, you end up languishing in ignorance, further and further distorting the form until it's so far gone it's not even recognizably human -- you're stylizing something that is already a stylization. It just doesn't work. You have to have that foundation, something you can return to in order to understand what makes something human and what makes something not look human, or you will be completely blind to your errors.

Tracing the footsteps of an artist you admire is always more productive than blindly copying his final works. And I will reiterate, yet again, what exactly every single successful artist in history has done: he learned from life. He drew what he saw, he studied anatomy, he carefully watched how light behaved, and he supplemented his observations with textbook knowledge that was not drawn by 13 year old girls on DevianTART. Yes, even anime/manga artists. Amuria and Ramy are not people you should aspire to.

Picture related [link] . It's by Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous abstract artists of all time. Even he knew how to make a realistic painting; it was his solid foundation in the basics of art that made his subsequent foray into the abstract arts so successful.

IF YOU WANT TO BE TAKEN AS A SERIOUS ARTIST* AND/OR YOU WANT TO IMPROVE HOW YOU DRAW, YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS -- Or at least consider it.

*I'm not a serious artist. This is my hobby, but if I were -- I'd be drawing from life all. the. freaking. time.

( If you truly aspire to being the best artist you can be, be humble and open to the idea of criticism and seeing your own flaws and don't start getting on the defensive. I'm not saying call bullshit on anyone who tries to compliment you on your work, just take it as a thanks and continue getting better -- DONT STOP. )