How do you build an intuition for anime idiosyncrasies? The stuff that doesn't rely on any rules or construction but you just have to knowIt's usually obvious when someone is actually Japanese vs another culture's cartoon style so there have to be some principles behind it
>>8051467I've heard that even with American cartoons like Simpsons they need to know how to mix and max up to 5000 expressions. It's just mixing and matching, pulling and stretching emoticons.
anime and manga is literally just reading andrew loomis
>>8051467Watch more anine
>>8051467you can build a visual library of the features and styles and cartoonish shorthand visual gags in anime and manga by watching and reading them. That kind of face gag is called kaogei (or "face performance") which has origins in Japanese kabuki theatre. Basically when you want to infer comedy in a perfomance you'd have a guy put on an outrageous mask or expression and do an over the top reaction. Similar to the way during Shakespeare's era there'd be a dude on stage making wisecracks and pretending to fart on the audience to lighten the mood and give the proles something to laugh at. Sailor Moon is great place to start for kaogei because it does it so well. If you want a more comprehensive curated libary there's one here: https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2019/12/kaogei.html there's a grid at the bottom where you can follow up on each expression type by category (pic related).
>>8051482Eeeeeeh as much as I am a Loomis fag I think the skills that OP mentions require a separate skill set that Loomis doesnt teach. Even with his "Fun with a Pencil" book the cartoons that he draws still have too much structure in em to ever be as loose and freeform like the pic in OP. Like in OP's pic some shit is easy to incorporate in one's personal drawings like drawing basic swirls in the place of eyes cause thats a easy symbol to recognize, but achieving the look of those other drawings is harder cause that requires active squashing and stretching of the characters features. It also requires a good proper understanding of your own character design cause you want to know what the limits are on your character in terms of how far they can be stretched before it starts looking unrecognizable/bad.Like to illustrate that Im gonna use the meme elf. On the right we see her "on model" form, the state where she is expected to be at normally, and on the left we see two examples of her in a more caricature state. The one on top still keeps recognizable elements but exaggerated in some areas and simplified in others. On the bottom you see what this artist typically does and just copes an image and adds some of the elf iconography on top. Most artists want to achieve the results of something like the top image, where they have an established character but want to push them to their extremes, but want to avoid something like the bottom where they just copy something someone else made and add some cheap details and still say no its still the same characters you guys. Like even though what this anon here >>8051712 is saying is harmless advice cause it is good to build up a database in your head you dont just wanna copy faces from other characters either cause aside from the obvious symbols like stars for eyes or the :3 lips those exaggerated faces are still based on those original designs so for your own characters you gotta discover what works for them
At the end of the day this isnt one of those things you can be taught outright. Its something that must be learned through trial an error and getting comfortable with being loose and to not be so tied to the structure and rules of the character design that you established, but not go too far unless you want your character to be unrecognizable. I find that animators tend to have it easy in this regard cause in order for some animations to work properly they HAVE to purposefully twist these characters in ways that conventionally look odd in isolation cause it will look fine in the animation. Its no wonder that when you ask them to do it ON PURPOSE they can make all these unique faces that are still recognizably those characters
>>8051482He was literally and specifically asking about the parts that aren’t covered by Loomis. The stylization of facial features etc. The only way to learn that stuff is to actually study anime
>>8051467a thousand refs copied by hand grants me skill to draw them at the end... a thousand refs copied by hand...
>>8052421not them, but>cries softly as i crack open my dog-eared coffee stained old reference manga for the 1000th time. where’s that 756th panel…>newly formed tears dot the work as i flip through the pages, further blurring the ink. i reach a chapter where the lines remain crisp, the paper no longer wavy as a storm-tossed sea. >oh ya, there’s where i left off.^ but the thing is, it’s true. dehydration and back pain are the eternal nemeses.
