lisola:

8bitmaximo:

lisola:

foervraengd:

luvlymilk:

This will be one of the times where I write about something I care about. As all of you who follow me should know, art is a huge part of my life, so I think about it a lot and it is easy for me to over-think things that people say…especially…

Although I sympathize with OP, I gotta say “anime” and “fine art” are not even styles.

If you ask me the word “style” is misused and underutilized to be of much use to people discussing something as vast and varied as art. Currently the way “style” works, is people will group a bunch of artists based on trivial common ground and then slap a “style” label to it with whatever word that happens nearby. Now when you hear that word, you think of one image in your brain to summarize a bunch of people. Most people think for instance

• Indy style = Black and white autobiographical comics with chicken scratch linework.

When it should actually mean

• Indy = Independent  = Self made

OR

• Anime style = Big eyes, tiny noses, high saturation, cute shit

When it actually means

• Anime = Animation in Japanese = Animation from Japan

An actual USEFUL way to define “art style” would be by motivation for instance:

• Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.^[1][2] Expressionist artists sought to express meaning^[3] or emotional experience rather than physical reality.
• Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects “in accordance with secular, empirical rules”,^[1] as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation.

( By the way the most people who use the word “Realism” use it like “oh hey I was trying to make this look realistic” and most of the time they aren’t even close. The only reason I see them using it is to flee from being labeled “anime artist”. Therefore acknowledging a error as truth and then using an other error to make sure their feelings don’t get hurt. )

• Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
• Caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person, animal or object to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.^[1]

See a pattern here? There’s motivation, reason, to explain why it looks like the it does. Now what’s the motivation that dictates how the art will look behind “anime” “western” “comic” “webcomic” ? These are either nationalities or formats, they aren’t ideas, or motivations themselves, therefore I won’t acknowledge them as “styles”.

I see plenty of artists I can ascribe no “label” to, and really how necessary are these labels??

^ this is very much relevant. The one thing that always bothered me about being called an “anime artist” is that I don’t make anime and it never made sense to me (people who knows me irl have probably heard me rant about it once or twice even haha). I decided to leave it alone when first reblogging the post because I couldn’t really put together words to explain it.

(via shilloshilloh)