Fuck Yeah Art Student Owl | What’s the aversion to Japanese manga and anime-esque art in art schools? I can understand the naive believe of having a portfolio full of fan art and expecting to pass as ridiculous, but is there a stigma for drawing outside the styles of Americana? And completely unrelated — how much of your student body submitted an AP Studio Art folio in high school?

regent-eiko asked: What's the aversion to Japanese manga and anime-esque art in art schools? I can understand the naive believe of having a portfolio full of fan art and expecting to pass as ridiculous, but is there a stigma for drawing outside the styles of Americana?

And completely unrelated -- how much of your student body submitted an AP Studio Art folio in high school?

As a cartooning major, I definitely see a ton of stigma attached to drawing in an anime or manga influenced style. As a result, I have over the years pushed my personal comic art to be less and less anime-looking, for fear of being taken less seriously.

That being said, I don’t see anything wrong with anime or American anime itself. I grew up on it, and it inspired me to even consider comics as a medium. I think it gets overlooked because the heavily stylized look of it can be used as an excuse and a crutch to a lazy artist who doesn’t want to learn the basics of human anatomy and structure.

Young artists who grew up in the 80s and 90s and even early 00s, when anime started really catching on in the States, latched onto the art of Sailor Moon and Akira and Dragon Ball and Fruits Basket and what have you, and absorbed the art style as gospel. So they drew the eyes with the same shines as Naoko Takeuchi did, or drew muscles like Akira Toriyama, copied from cels but never learned what the human body looked like in real life. Which is not only shortsighted, but derivative. This can really set you back, unfortunately. I haven’t drawn in an “anime” style in years, but I still get stuck when I realize the proportions of the 40 year old man I’m drawing makes him look like a 14 year old schoolgirl.

As for your second question, I’m afraid I have no idea! I suppose everyone who took AP art, which was maybe 12-15 kids in my class.