Art Style, Favorite Artists

Hey everyone and welcome toooooo…

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DANNYYYYY’S CORNNNEEERRRRRR~!!!

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Today we’ll be having the second installment, with some questions from viewers.  We hope you’ve been looking forward to it!

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Yes, it’s been a while since the first one.  It’s good to see everyone again.

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First, we’ve received the question, do you aim for photo realism overall versus a more cartoon-ish look?

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Hmm, well I’d have to say my “style” is in-between the two.  I grew up watching and drawing anime, but I quickly began to learn and adapt traditional art techniques at a young age as well.  As I started to mature as an artist, I wanted to combine the technical foundations of figure drawing and the attractive visual aesthetics of anime to form a “realistic animated style” if you will.

I think you can see a lot of this manifest in proportions, like facial features such as the size of the eyes, mouth, nose, as well as overall body proportions, like waist size, leg length, and neck length.  It must take an understanding of both styles to try and combine them both, huh?

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That’s right.  Many kids grow up drawing their favorite animes or cartoons, but I think it’s very important to also have a good foundation of traditional drawing.  All “stylized” drawing is an exaggeration of real life and in order to exaggerate correctly, to manipulate reality correctly, one must first understand the basics of drawing.  I think this is what separates artists from amateurs, regardless of what style you use, be it photo realism, cubism, impressionism, caricatures or cartoons.

How do you think your choice of style affects your artwork in general?

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I’ve always believed that the way you draw something and what you draw have an integral connection.  So for example, my art often deals with discovering the inherent beauty in any object, place or action.  So this lends my art to be very detail oriented and based on a sense of realism.  However, values of beauty or aesthetics in general are subjective, so I try to stylize my drawings to reflect how I view them and show what I find meaningful in them.  This is sort of a difficult style to translate into animation, as the amount of work it takes to draw something exponentially increases as you add more detail.  But putting in the time and effort to create the artwork you want is the price any animator, or any artist for that matter, is willing to pay.

Whew, that was a lot to take in at once.  Let’s move onto the second question, shall we?  This one should be an easier one to answer.  Who are some of your favorite artists?

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Some of the contemporary artists I love are Yoshitaka Amano, Oh! Great, Hiroaki and Nona from SNK Playmore, and Kim Hyung-Tae among others.  Being an animator, I would also have to mention my favorite directors and studios.  STUDIO4°C, Production I.G., Studio Ghibli, Gainax, Madhouse, and Kyoto Animation are some of my favorite studios, while Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Hosoda, Yuri Norstein, and Koji Yamamura are some directors I love.  I also like manga artist/animator Atsuya Uki for his work on Cencoroll.  Creating an entire animation by yourself is something I highly respect and is the very thing I’d like to do as an artist.  Which leads me to manga artists… Akira Toriyama,  Eiichiro Oda, Takehiko Inoue, and also Tsutomu Nihei.

…haha, that was a longer answer than I expected.  Oh well, let’s see, next questi-

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If by artists you mean traditional 2d painters or sculptors, you could say Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, and Caravaggio amongst others and I also highly enjoy all types of eastern paintings and sculptures.  Of course, you can also mention musicians, as music has played a huge influence on my art.  Some composers would be Yoko Kanno, Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yiruma and Yoshiki while my favorite singers/bands are Gackt, the Gazette, Miyavi and Girugamesh as well as other various electronic, experimental music.

…..are you done?

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But depending on your definition of artist, many other professions can be entailed…  Writers, poets, even dancers, actors…  This is actually quite a complicated question.  You’d have to define what an “artist” is and to do that you’d have to define what “art” is…  Now, art is the proce-

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You’re not listening, are you…  At this rate, we’re gonna run out of time…

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-to affect the senses or emotions towards the aesthetics of what is beautiful, meaningful, or important.  But that’s subjective to individual humans isn’t it?  Or at least the way we view and understand art is based on our own opinions which is different for everyone… or is it?  There may be a basic human subco-

Aaaaaaaaand we’re out of time.  Join us next time on Danny’s Corner, where we’ll hopefully get to answer more questions once Danny stops rambling.

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-ased on human perception and cognition.  But that leads us to mind-body dichotomy.  Now, Plato states that, “the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and is thus immor-

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That’s the latest Danny’s Corner for now!  You can send more questions through the contact form here.