I am 23 and a graduate of Cleveland State University with Magna Cum Laude honors in Studio Art: Drawing. I will mainly post male related drawings and definitely my original characters.
why do anime girls from the 80s and 90s look so much better than anime girls today
Three factors: Color, personality, and realism.
First, color and shading.
vs.
The predominant style of the day in anime employs very crisp cell shading and eye-watering colors. Both female and male hair and eye coloration comes in any range of colors, from neon to pastel to white (although female characters most often display this). The typical color for skin in anime has gradually lightened to almost pure white over the years. Additionally, modern anime has a very specific, hard method of shading and highlighting that makes hair and skin look unnaturally shiny and often gross, lowering the realism value and throwing the texture of the skin into uncanny valley territory.
Secondly, anatomical proportions. Besides the shading, female character body and facial proportions have degraded so much that they are barely caricatures of human anatomy. Here are some examples of female anatomy in early anime:
and some in modern anime:
The biggest changes have been to the breast to waist proportion. For some reason, anime producers believe that an E-cup is the appropriate cup-size for an average 14 year old Japanese female. Bodies have also lost all of their depth (that come from an illusion of thickness necessary to two dimensional media) in favor of being skinny and flat (except for voluminous breasts, of course) and many normal, attractive parts of ladies (ribcages, stomach pooches, and natural folds) are simply smoothed over. Another noticeable change has been to the eyes and facial shape. Anime noses and mouths are apparently inversely proportional to eye shape, size, and distance apart. As the size of the eye increases, shape becomes more prominent, and distance towards the ears increases, the size of the nose, mouth, and chin decrease, contributing highly to the uncanny valley effect many modern any girls have.
Take these faces:
vs these
Thirdly, anime girls have lost much of their visible personality over the years due to moefication. This has happened to male characters also, although to a lesser extent. Anime girls are often not allowed to make cartoonish expressions (deemed unattractive) or generally change their expressions at all barring blush lines. In producers’ efforts to make the girls attractive to the audience in every frame, they sacrifice any personality that they might have. Anime girls look increasingly similar to one another, differentiated only by their hair style and eyes. Granted, there has always been a problem with female character same-face syndrome since the conception of anime (actually, in all drawn media) but as the number of female main characters in anime has grown, ironically, the problem has only increased.
Wow! Anime girls with the same hair color that you can actually tell apart!
And somehow, girls with all different colors that you can’t.
TLDR: modern anime girls look like washed out bobbleheads with no personality in a sad attempt to piggyback off of the success of older anime with more fleshed out (literally and figuratively) female characters
The screenshots in this post were taken from Urusei Yatsura, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Ranma ½, Kimagure Orange Road, Ping Pong Club, One Piece, Angel Beats, Higurashi When They Cry, Sword Art Online, Shakugan No Shana, and Chobits. The examples above were not used to bash any anime, but merely to demonstrate the evolution of anime art tropes from the 1980s to now.
Hi guys! I’m Joana Ferreira but in the cosplay community I’m known as L'Aquila. I’m a portuguese crossplayer from the north (Oporto).I’ve been cosplaying since 2012 and my most recognizable cosplay are my Ezio Auditore cosplays.
My goal is to make my cosplays look believable and 100% accurate (or close to) of the original reference and make people think I’m actually a guy when it’s all just make up that washed off at the end of the day.
Becoming my patreon would help me create cosplays faster and a lot more since an avarage cosplay from me can range from 150 to 800 euros in materials and hours I put into it and sadly I cannot afford as I as any human being have bills to pay and work to do outside cosplaying, but this is a hobby I LOVE to do and I would wish to continue doing for many years to come.
I would post tutorials and if things got better even start working on my youtube channel that I share hand-in-hand with my art/illustration side so I could create video tutorials other than written step-by-step tutorials.
The higher patrons get from signed prints to handcrafted goodies to even be able to help me decide which cosplay to create next! ;) Check the link above for more information on the pledges! =3
Any type of support would be more than welcome ^_^
Thank you so much!
-L’Aquila
Just launched my other patreon after an year pondering :)
-throws confettis-
I had made a newlaunch. U got new rewards going on :D
Please share around ;^; it would make me happy for my cosplay patreon community to grow behold my country <3
Sharing this here because I know this will affect a LOT of artists here.
PLEASE share this, this is super urgent and I don’t want any of you losing your funds.
Seriously, this is not a joke or scam. Check the comments of that Medium article, or the Reddit comments.
Apparently PayPal will try to re-ban you if you use the same cards or whatnot, so if you need an alternative, try Google Wallet. (Because Google won’t let a damn industry go untouched.)
If you see your work as more as a business, try Stripe.
Dark Spectrum
