Is she copying an anime face, or is she making one up?
I don’t see any anime/manga for her to copy there.
If she’s creating new artwork in the anime style, then that isn’t “a memory” of someone else’s face – that’s just Mary’s personal style.
Also… I just defended Mary. I feel dirty. **shivers**
(to add some evidence to this, haven’t we seen Mary create many other anime characters in the dorm, including some based on actual people there? – I’m too lazy to look it up, but I seem to remember some little chibi drawings of her dorm mates at one point. If so – that’s original art work, not a copy)
I’m going to do a bad job explaining this but I’m gonna try my best
just because you’re drawing an anime face that you’ve made up yourself doesn’t mean you’re not drawing a face how someone else remembers a face. the idea is that instead of doing proper life studies to learn the anatomy of a face, then using that knowledge to stylize a face into something anime, she instead refuses to look at real life for her basis and instead only draws from knowledge of other anime styles.
that approach can have kind of an “insestuous” effect on your art. it takes the flaws of the artists you copy from and amplifies them, because you don’t have that base knowledge of real life anatomy to correct yourself with. ideally what any artist who seriously wants to go into art as a career would do is have a strong real life base while taking inspiration from many different artists with a variety of styles, even if you do just want to draw anime. Mary is caught up in a common pitfall of “I’m only interested in drawing anime so I will only draw anime”, which is fine if art is just a hobby, but not the greatest for an art class.
Very well put! And I agree with you completely. She is skipping the basics. Anime cartoons and even the characters in a single cartoon have a distinct difference in styles and features that set them apart from each other. If Mary is doing what you and Willis are implying, all of the people she draws probably have very similar looks to them. I’m inclined to believe this is the case since her current piece of art is slim while Malaya’s is more pudgy. Based on the teacher’s reaction, Malaya’s is probably the more accurate. If Mary was truly trying to convert what she is seeing into anime style, she should have made her drawing huskier. There are plenty of larger anime characters in existence, so it isn’t forbidden by the style. Instead, she is simply drawing a generic anime character with the correct hair style (maybe), hair color, skin color, and eye color.
Counterpoint:
I am no drawy person, but I did go through something similar.
I love romance novels and all their derivations (such as romance manga).
I particularly love fantasy romance novels (ie romance + magic).
Throughout highschool, undergrad, and (while less so) even occasionally in grad school, I had teachers – FUCKING TEACHERS – shitting on my writing because it was romance-related and telling me to get with that pretentious Iowa Writers crap.
And no, I was not just ‘parroting’ things back – I was deconstructing the genre and reconstructing it based on my own personal experiences. I was learning and developing a style while engaging with the genre that I love and care about most.
And I got treated to assholes like Malaya telling me how derivative and shit everything I wrote was not because of the quality of the writing but because of the genre I enjoyed writing in.
Can I write in other genres? Sure. But it’s BORING. I don’t like it. So whenever possible, I wrote fantasy romance (high, urban, historic – they’re all good).
I didn’t get any positive feedback from teachers until college, and even then only from one teacher, and only half-hearted because while she was okay with the fantasy elements, she still didn’t like the romance bent and tried to steer me away from it.
In gradschool, I finally met two more open-minded professors (one of whom introduced me to actual published LGBT romance novels, something I’d never seen before). But that was a long damn time of people being shitty to me.
And now I’m a published LGBT romance novelist and a professor of English, so –
**flips double birds at every teacher who shat on me**
Anyway, my point is that just because someone embraces a style does not mean that they aren’t using their experiences (such as a nude model) to hone and improve their ability. Again, I’m not a drawy person, so it IS possible that I’m missing some nuance here, but both Malaya and Mary had drawings in the same pose. It seemed to me that Mary was drawing the model – just in her own way.
I also want to point out that Malaya is NOT a reliable critic. Her entire characterization to this point is projecting her own insecurities onto others – ie calling Sal a “fake” when it is actually Malaya who feels like a fake. He critique of Mary may be just the same – not at all about Mary or her drawings but about Malaya and her issues with feeling disconnected from her own body.
Anyway, I’ve explained my own visceral reaction to this, so I’m gonna bail now. I don’t much like defending Mary, but in this, I feel for her. And I wish that my teachers had been half as supportive of me as hers is to her.
I think if you want to put Mary’s and Malaya’s drawings in writing terms, then Malaya knows more and more different words than Mary and can put them together in more, and more interesting, ways. Hers might not be as refined since Mary has been writing for longer, but Mary has a certain repertoire of words and expressions and keeps putting them together in the same patterns over and over.
Going back to the drawings from last strip. Mary has put nearly no effort into the body, it’s just some flat lines and a bit of shadow on the neck. She instead focused on the idealized anime face (complete with blush and everything). Also, she has chopped off the fingers and is ignoring whatever the model is leaning his hand on.
Malaya hasn’t even tried to draw the face beyond determining where the nose is pointing and where the ear is. She has put a lot of shadows on the body giving it depth and volume. She also has a lot more lines than Mary. She has drawn thin lines that weren’t quite right but close enough, then gone back and drawn thicker lines in better places.
In writing terms, Malaya first writes a draft, then goes back and starts changing things and making them closer to where she wants it to be. Mary has one style of writing and just hammers it out never changing anything.
I’m extremely not a writer so my perspective on your point might not be the most insightful, this is just what I’ve picked up from people I follow who talk about writing.
my understanding is that romance tends to be frowned upon because of stereotypes like “it’s all fluff”, “it’s easy and anybody can do it”, “it’s basically porn for women” when that is far from the truth. there’s nothing wrong with writing romance and there’s nothing wrong with drawing anime. both anime style art and romance novels can be extremely well executed, and they aren’t inherently worse than any other genre/style.
what Mary is doing though is less similar to writing in a genre that has negative stereotypes attached to it, and more similar to refusing to learn things like metaphor, symbolism or how to make a piece thematically coherent. the purpose of life studies is to practice your basics so you can apply them to your art later. they’re not really meant to be fun or a way to express yourself, they’re the boring practice stuff you gotta do to improve your skills. even just the artwork shown in the last strip, you can see that Mary’s art is a lot more stiff, like a drawing of a plastic doll. the character doesn’t have any weight to it, which is something she would be able to learn and improve on through doing her life studies properly. then when she drew anime boys later, they would look a lot more life-like.
of course it’s 1000% true that there are art professors that will poopoo anime styles no matter what, even if the art is for personal enjoyment and is excellent on a technical level. that’s always super lame when you get a professor like that, but that’s not what’s happening here. if she was handing in an assignment that met all of the criteria and also happened to be in an anime style, that would be a different story.
but yes I’ll leave it at this too, I don’t wanna drag it out either
Yo, I just wanna say that it’s really awesome you’re a published author of LGBT stories. That’s super awesome and fuck every professor who didn’t give your work a chance because of that. Thank you so much for sticking with it, the world needs more of what you’re putting out there. I only recently discovered that there are actually a decently large variety of publisehd works out there about people like me and, not gonna lie, I cried a little in relief after a childhood filled with characters who were (assumed to be) cishet.
However, as someone who is very much both a visual artist AND a writer, Angie is 100% on the nose. Mary isn’t just drawing art with an anime bent, from what we’ve been shown she consistently draws anime art BADLY. There’s a huge difference there that, as someone who also once drew stiff and visually uninspired anime art too, I can see. She’s not in control of her stylization, she’s a slave to it, as I once was. That’s pretty different from you being genre-savvy and completely cognizant of what writing ‘rules’ you were breaking. Stylization isn’t the same as genre choice, it really is much closer to figuring out how to effectively use metaphors/similes. (Thank you again to Angie for making that comparison! It really is perfect. Drawing really is all about figuring out what visual metaphors are the best for communicating the subject matter to your audience.)
I don’t want you to feel any pressure to respond to this, though, I see and respect why you’re upset and drained by this conversation. I’ve seen plenty of people who shit on anime art without even considering that it could possibly be good – and some of my absolute favorite art ever is by someone whose stuff is unquestionably anime-styled, so it totally bothers me too! ;~; ‘Anime’ should not be used as a catch-all for bad art/media, but it often is. Not to mention that, uh, the vast majority of my characters are LGBT, so I get the struggles you’re talking about too (though my writing partner and I aren’t published, so we haven’t had to fight publishers yet directly haha). But, while Malaya may not be the most unbiased messenger… what she’s saying is painfully #relatable as an artist who went from hobbyist to more serious halfway through learning art.
Again, no pressure to respond, I don’t want to draw this out if you’re not feeling up to it. I just wanted to add the perspective of someone who actually does both drawing and writing, since no one else had yet in this thread.
I may hate Mary, but I have been taking offense to everything Malaya has been saying for personal reasons. We are people, even if she reduces people to meat and bones like a Rick Sanchez edgelord. Even if Mary is not drawing realisticaly for the purpose of the class, I am highly triggered when other people accuse artists of drawing “anime style”. There are like hundreds of difefrent styles in anime, so I am horrible pissed when I hear comments like that.
Hah, that’s funny. This is maybe the first thing Malaya has said that doesn’t make me hate her. People are important, but we’re still just minds in meat suits. That’s not “edgy,” it’s just basic materialism.
As for the art, get over yourself. I enjoy “anime” styles as much as anybody (spent the evening watching some, as a matter of fact) but what Mary is doing is textbook bad art practice. She’s not drawing the model, she’s drawing her internalized style. That’s exactly what you’re NOT supposed to be doing when learning to draw, and is a well-known impediment to getting better as an artist. That she doesn’t recognize that she’s doing it is a major flaw. Nobody cares who’s style she’s copying, that’s no the point.
This is semantics. Her point is that while we think of a person by their physical form the actual entity that does all the experiencing of the world is the mind that’s currently occupying that body. There’s nothing particularly special or unique about any single person’s body, but their mind is a conscious entity capable of experience. She’s not denigrating people by acting like they’re worthless pieces of meat, she’s emphasising the mind over the physical vessel it happens to be carried by.
I agree with you (regarding ‘anime style’ not being a monolith)… and also, unfortunately, have to disagree with you. I’m a huge proponent of artists drawing in whatever styles make them happy, so it really does pain me to say this! But…
As someone who, like Mary, started drawing with an anime-inspired bent, it’s been hard to unlearn those habits over the years. Thankfully I’ve been using photo references for the better part of ten years, so I’ve begun to take my art in a direction I feel is more nuanced than the art I poorly imitated as a kid, but… it’s still a struggle I’ve seen those who studied anatomy earlier bypass. I wish I’d learned to observe BEFORE actually jumping into drawing too much. Learning to draw and learning to see are two completely different skill sets.
To me, it’s definitely not about singling out anime as somehow lesser art – some of my favorite art is that of Shigenori Soejima, whose work for the Persona games would be unquestioningly recognized as anime. I also tend to strongly prefer at least slightly stylized art, so I’m not a snob who only likes realism (quite the opposite, I find most extremely realistic art pretty boring LOL). But when you do nothing but uncritically parrot another artist’s style, you aren’t learning WHY they stylized it a certain way. If you haven’t studied a variety of actual noses, and instead just copy specific angles of highly stylized noses, your ability to draw a more realistic nose if you ever do need to suffers.
And maybe you’ll never need to! It’s true that you can be a professional artist and not be very versatile. Or have a solid grasp on anatomy. But I think that’s what Malaya is getting at here, though of course in her characteristically antagonistic way: Malaya is actually analyzing what she’s given and mentally synthesizing it into something based on the source, while Mary is drawing the IDEA of a person. You can be incredibly successful as an artist by following that method, but I totally understand why Malaya is bringing up that critique in this environment specifically. Any other time, I’d agree it was rude, but… they’re in a class, ostensibly to learn.
I know a lot of art teachers have an inherent bias toward anime (but not American comics), and it sucks! I get it. :C But back when my drawings had an obvious anime inspiration, I had a figure drawing teacher who acted like theirs, and it didn’t help me grow as an artist at all.
It’s really what you do any time you practice drawing by drawing from a stylistic source instead of lifedrawing, regardless if it’s from a CGI series, a video game, an anime or a Disney movie.
If someone would practice drawing faces from these comics, they would essentially draw Willis’ memory of what a face looks like, not truly what a face looks like according to their own analysis.
Hmm. I’m noticing that a lot of people are pointing out a possible body dysphoria based on this comment. But she is absolutely correct from a life-model standpoint. Mary is drawing an idea of a person. Instead, she should be looking at the form in front of her. The point of a life model is to give artists a chance to see how the body is put together. To really be able to analyse it appropriately, you need to divorce yourself from preconceived notions and just draw what’s there. Look at the person in front of you, not as a person, but a sculpture of meat and bone. Then, you copy the lines of the sculpture.
If Mary has never drawn a turkey before, she would have to first find the form of what it is, then, once she has a good understanding of what makes a turkey what it is, convert it to an anime style. This would probably involve softening some lines and creating some new angles, but if it’s successful, it would be recognizable as both a turkey and an anime art style. It would probably be a great exercise to help Mary improve.
She is talking about the mind and body being entirely separate – about her mind puppeting a meat-sack, effectively. That implies both that she feels entirely separate from her body and that she assumes others feel as she does.
Combine this with the “Sal’s a faker – wait I’m also a faker” stuff from earlier and my read some serious body dysphoria.
Also, for reference, I may be using the wrong medical term. Not a doctor. I was taking the term “gender dysphora” – ie, feeling like you are in the wrong body – and extrapolating “body dysphora” – ie, feeling disconnected from one’s body. There may be a more correct term, so sorry if that caused confusion.
I guess you’re right. What I was getting at is that part of what she’s saying is that people are minds and bodies, and there’s no such thing as a soul. Which I agree with, so maybe I just read it that way because it’s part of my worldview.
There’s some dualism beyond the typical materialist position (the mind being housed in the brain which is also meat), but the general position of a brain being the more central component of self with the body a glorified meat vehicle? That’s pretty standard, and hardly edgy.
Plus, in the context of a figure drawing class the actual particulars of meat vehicle construction are pretty important to learning the basics of art. Stylization in any style is generally best added afterwards.
I’m perfectly at home in my body, but I don’t think my body is really part of my identity. I remember when I was drafted towards the end of the Vietnam war and one of the first things they did was to give us a close haircut. For some of my long-haired friends it changed their conception of who they were. I didn’t understand that, and I still don’t. I’m me. Cut my hair off or grow it long and then put me in pigtails, whatever, it’s not going to change who I am. Put me in a body of the other sex and it may take me awhile to adjust to the new plumbing, but otherwise my identify is not changing a great deal. My body is not me. I’m used to my body and comfortable with it, though not happy about the fact that after 70 years it’s starting to wear out a little around the edges. Give me a chance to trade it in on a new model without harming someone (say by evicting them) and I’m definitely considering it. I don’t think minds piloting carcasses is all that we are, but otherwise, she’s not wrong. This isn’t Malaya being edgelordy, this is Malaya being helpful, albeit Malaya-style.
Only actual advice she’s giving here is that Mary is caught up in what she think human’s look like, which has been 18 years of seeing an object without analyzing it so you have some vague idea of the shapes without understanding the construction, and her drawing relies on everybody else also seeing these generic shapes and shortcuts to understand that it’s a human body they’re looking at.
But I don’t actually think Malaya understands herself that that was useful, her personal philosophy regarding bodies just happens to put her in a mindset that lets her advance at a faster rate in art because she doesn’t have a lot of bad habits to unlearn.
Her attitude is edgelordy and unhelpful. But she’s not wrong. To draw the human body well, you need to break it down and understand how it all goes together. You get much more realistic poses and proportions when you understand the skeleton and how the muscles overlay it and move, and how the skin behaves and where fat commonly distributes and, where applicable, how breasts actually look and move. It’s not uncommon to be assigned a series of studies of single body parts.
I agree. She may not be correct as to Mary’s internal process, but she’s obviously given it some thought, and has some insight. She has depths that have not been apparent before.
Miyazaki, that hippie?! With all his pacifism and environmentalism and movies about spirits and things?!
Actually, I kinda wonder if Mary’s parents aren’t super chill, and she’s the only right-winger in the family, sorta like Alex in Family Ties. Only worse because she’s Mary instead of Michael J Fox.
Could be. My mother had a friend who raised her daughter non-religiously. At 14, that daughter converted to an ultra traditionalist (Vatican II rejecting) Catholic faith.
That’s when my no-longer-religious mother decided to raise us as Unitarians.
When I went through my fundamentalist phase, it wasn’t my parents’ fault. It wasn’t even my church’s fault. I was just taking the bones of what their beliefs were built on and pushing them to an extreme conclusion. There were plenty of people in my orbit that encouraged and enabled it, but it didn’t come from any kind of indoctrination. (That’s part of why it was so easy for me to leave that phase; it was my choice to go down that road, so it was my choice to leave it. I decided that I cared about people more than I cared about feeling intellectually superior about eschatology. Look, I was a teenager.)
Willis might’ve changed his mind (I know he has in the past regarding the subject of whether this universe’s Amber has half-siblings), but I believe he’s mentioned before that Mary’s parents are good people – and that Mary is just the sort of person who took all the wrong lessons to heart.
She is of course absolutely correct. People who believe humans are made in the image of god tend to forget (or actively dismiss the idea) that we are still animals.
Hmm… that means that she probably has the same Manga Bible (New Living Translation) I have then. I never could reconcile a bishounen Jesus and Isaiah 53’s prophecy.
I disagree with Malaya, unless she is expressing body dysphoria. People aren’t the image of a god, nor anime characters, but they are more than the atoms of their bodies. They have feeling, memories, families, friends, enemies, talents, likes, dislikes, personalities, perceptions, dreams, hopes, fears, love, etc. Shallow materialism cant reach all those experiences, and that is why Edward and Alphose failed to recreate their mother.
On Reading #1, Malaya’s criticizing Mary’s art style. Malaya says that Mary should look at human bodies and see meat (muscle, skin, bones, etc) and draw that, rather than seeing and drawing people, as a way to produce more realistic renderings. Malaya says that Mary’s just copying someone else’s art style rather than making her own art. Mary counters by seeing Malaya as meat for wolves.
On Reading #2, Mary suggests an original-sin concept of moral evil and Malaya counters with a nihilistic and materialist world view. Malaya says Mary is lost in a visage of past philosophy and therefore blinded to reality. Mary then counters with a world view of Malaya’s material ripped apart by wolves. Bad Mary! It’s ripped apart by bears! Be Biblical!
On Reading #3, Malaya is torn between her anticipations for the upcoming holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving, and talking about drawing turkeys and zombies.
P.S. while Malaya’s view is materialistic in the technical sense of that word, I don’t see it as nihilistic. The fact that we are flesh and blood (and therefore doomed to die) does not mean life is purposeless and pointless. We can make our own meaning.
Rejecting that we are people is still a douchy thing. It’s like saying a person is just their body, like when Joe tried to justify objectifying people, but Joyce revealed to hime when rapey mcdouchebag saw her as an object.
It’s a shot at Mary borrowing someone else’s style rather than developing her own.
Which is BS because, for many people, taking on an anime or manga style IS their style. I know someone who can dash off anime-style drawings from her own brain in a matter of moments that look fucking professional.
It’s not about her borrowing someone’s style, but that she is copying a style without understanding the underlying reasons for the stylistic choices, which makes you just stray further away from the theory behind said artistic choices until you have a mess that is barely readable.
Lets take the reflection in eyes as an example. An easy beginner mistake is mirroring a set of white spots from the other eye you drew, since everything else is mirrored pretty much. This disregards completely that the white spots are reflection from a light source bouncing off a shiny/wet surface in the shape of a ball, and not a part of the bilateral body symmetry, and can be enough for the human brain to register there is something uncanny with the drawing without people being able to pinpoint what is wrong, just that /something/ is wrong.
You need to be able to understand the rules in art to be able to break them the right way/taking shortcuts. Otherwise it’s not artistic choices, it’s just a pile of mistakes and laziness.
I’m not saying that she necessarily is gonna be bad at drawing anime, but that if she is still drawing anime in a lifedrawing class and doesn’t even try to break out of it to do lifedrawing, then she’s just sitting and doing all the shortcuts she already knew without working on her technique, and she’s expecting to be able to ride on those shortcuts
They are already on the menu in plenty of countries. They are just different breeds than what we see at the race track, etc. You don’t automatically eat a good dairy animal, same thing with specialized horses. Exceptions for over abundance, age, injury, etc.
It’s sort of intriguing watching these two interact, because Malaya has all the likeability of a wild hog and Mary is Mary, and Malaya treats Mary the sort of way Mary treats everyone else except flippantly, while Mary is completely unable to hurt Malaya in any way, so strips like today come out like something from an Ingmar Bergman film.
Dunno, let’s head over the good ol’ Deviant art to find out.
NOT SAFE FOR WORK AT ALL!!!!!!!
(I mean, technically I suppose it is but come on, don’t browse deviant art at work unless you have a really forgiving boss)
By and large the same scantily-clad (if at all) anime female bodies as always, just with furry ears and sometimes a bushy tail in order to distinguish “wolves” from “cats”. Seems like not just Mary needs a cue from Malaya.
You would expect Malaya to actually give advice on how to draw realistically or to not be bigoted… TOO BAD! PSYCHE! It doesn’t matter if you are good or evil, or talented or untalented, Malaya will destroy your hopes and dreams with the same cruelty as Mike, but without creative comebacks or harsh truths. She is just a queen bongo, but if she turns out tobe a trans person then they will be a monarch asshole.
I think “you should be drawing turkeys” is a bit of advice, if not terribly detailed. It would get Mary away from preconceptions about stylized human form, and looking at what’s actually there. Maybe. Not many anime turkeys, anyway.
I’d want to hit them both if they were real, but they’re not and they’re bugging each other and it’s hilarious.
Hell is other people. Assholes having to deal with each other is better than inflicting themselves on decent people. They depend on other people being better than they are–and sometimes they’re not.
as far as I can tell, this counts as helpful advice and sincere support on planet Malaya.
So why does she care? Why is little miss “too cool to care about anyone else” bothered about wether or not Mary learns how to draw “proper” (whatever that means). Is it just professional pride? don’t want to see talants squandered? Did she herself go through an an-ey-mey-phase in middle school and hate to see someone else stuck in the same rut?
In their last class together, Mary implied that Malaya must be less skilled than her, offering her advice and pointers without even checking how Malaya’s technique looked, saying she would be happy to help out a novice. She’s still in the mindset of “the gifted one” that artistic kids easily get if they are the best one at art in elementary school (Her saying last time “I’ve always had a gift”), and hasn’t understood yet that in this setting, being an art major amongst other art people, her skills are probably mediocre.
Malaya just wants to push Mary into that realisation (and existential crisis) asap. Not for Mary’s own good so she can break down and then rise up from the bad habits that are keeping her down, but because nobody should try and pretend that they are better than they are, how dare they!
I suppose… but does Malaya really care about other people pretending they are better than they are?
I know she does it constantly to Sal, but at least in my reading that has more to do with what Malaya projects on Sal rather than a general attitude about how other people should behave.
I’m with Malaya. She’s objectifying the model so that Mary will draw what she sees rather than drawing yet another rendition of her concept of “man.” Because Malaya depersonalized the model, she was able to catch details to make those “impressive contours.” Malaya is learning as she sketches something different each time. Mary just repeats what’s in her head, reinforcing that habit and not progressing.
“We’re all just brains in bodies, maaaaan.” Thanks, fourteen year old stoner, we’d all be lost without your unparalleled insight.
“Anime isn’t real people.” Whoa, stand the fuck back, everybody. This girl is tearing apart the very foundations of society and inventing a brand new paradigm from scratch.
Gotta say, as someone who’s had a long-running antagonistic relationship with my body (health and disability-related), I actually find Malaya’s dissociation thing here really relatable? But yeah, probably not a particularly healthy attitude to have toward your physical form. Probably is useful in drawing what you see, though.
Heh, wish I was a better communicator. Malya is right, mary is severely screwed up in the head and yes. When you get down to it, we are all nothing but thoughts stimulating the chemicals in a meat sack. We are just (and I’m going to get this all wrong and the philosophy majors and ancient greek phd’s are going to ream me hard) meme moving meat.
I’m not quite sure how to parse that last. Are you saying that meat moves the memes or that memes move the meat? Not disagreeing either way. It’s like in general relativity where the geometry tells the mass/energy where to go and the mass/energy tells the geometry where to go.
I’m not entirely sure what Malaya’s talking about, but based on the few drawings I’ve seen Mary do she does need a firmer understanding of anatomy. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary.
Now I want to see Mary’s drawing on Malaya. The boy behind her looks rather terrified. Maybe she’s really good at drawing people who suffer or are tortured and murdered with cruelty.
Malaya‘s nihilism aside, she‘s spot on about how to draw. Abstraction is key to understand the actual shapes and inner workings of something. She is totally right about the memory thing.
For all her faults, Malaya really knows her shit when it comes to drawing. Nice to see a redeeming quality on her.
One doesn’t need body dysmorphia to feel or understand this concept/fact. But somebody who HAS experienced that is probably more likely to intuitively understand or realize it
And no, it doesn’t mean the mind is separate from the body. We have scientific data that strongly indicates otherwise. The mind-body connection is very real and demonstrable
And even more no, it doesn’t mean there’s no soul or spiritual component to a human. We have NO scientific data to indicate it, but the soul/spirit is a matter of Faith and Philosophy, not science and anatomy
Thank you. Whether or not I agree in a philosophical sense (it’s complicated), that’s a really good way of explaining how her drawing of the model and Mary’s are quite different. Malaya is drawing the object in front of her which just so happens to be a person, Mary is drawing a person which looks nothing like the object in front of her.
Malaya’s “assembled from meat and bone” reminds me of Chuck Jones’ autobiography where he remarks that drawing figures in a realistic-for-the-medium manner was a must for would-be animators. Bugs Bunny isn’t out of Grey’s Anatomy, but all the weight, motion, space, and gravity in a good cartoon starts with stuff like Malaya’s sketch shown yesterday.
She has that down, whether she can draw human (or anthropomorphic) expression we don’t know.
Not that I’m defending Mary at all… but anytime someone starts with a sentence, “Do you know what your problem is?”… they’re not actually going to be talking about YOUR problem. Nor are they actually trying to help you.
unpopular opinion but can we let the teacher be the only one who teaches people how to Art
(yes i realize this is a comic and all that but i have a Thing about students who try to teach people things and sort of undermine (for lack of a better word) the teacher. i have been That Student and learned that no one likes that)
I mean… this is a sub-one-minute snapshot of a conversation within a single class, so I’d say we don’t really have enough information to know whether the teacher is doing it.
I concur with JBento, the teacher isn’t doing his job. You don’t just make a vague statement to the whole class and hope the relevant student picks up on it, you *talk to* the student in question. “I like it”, “that’s a good drawing” etc are USELESS comments that, when our teachers have been telling us how to make a proper critique, they told us to NOT USE EVER as they are unhelpful.
Also, your fellow students are your greatest resource in art school. Everyone is at a different level and you can learn from and be INSPIRED by each other.
This is actually very good drawing advice. Everyone is inclined to draw what they think something looks like, instead of actually drawing the shapes that they’re seeing in front of them, and your memory lies to make things easier to keep track of. One example: your iris doesn’t appear perfectly round. The top and bottom are slightly hidden by your eyelids. But if someone tries to draw an eye without consciously looking at a reference, they often don’t remember that.
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headcanon: Mary is drawing the same anime man being mauled by the same anime mans
Only they all have wolf ears and tails, like catgirl style.
But they have tiny mouths, so not all that much mauling.
Or they could be humans given the skeletal proportions of a wolf, Satoshi Kawasaki style.
Why, oh why, did I decide to Google that? It’s like the Titans from Attack on Titan *shudder*
Those are amazing
Agreed. I particularly liked the human with the skeletal structure of a flamingo.
Yay, now I’ve got a name to attach to that art.
It’s anime mans all the way down.
Damn, Malaya, when did you get edgelordy?
Well, Malaya has implied that she doesn’t exactly feel comfortable in her own body before. This sounds like another run at that.
Other than the “someone else’s memory of a face” thing – THAT is just pretentious.
Pretentious but not incorrect.
Its accurate though. Thats what youre doing when you copy an anime face.
Is she copying an anime face, or is she making one up?
I don’t see any anime/manga for her to copy there.
If she’s creating new artwork in the anime style, then that isn’t “a memory” of someone else’s face – that’s just Mary’s personal style.
Also… I just defended Mary. I feel dirty. **shivers**
(to add some evidence to this, haven’t we seen Mary create many other anime characters in the dorm, including some based on actual people there? – I’m too lazy to look it up, but I seem to remember some little chibi drawings of her dorm mates at one point. If so – that’s original art work, not a copy)
I’m going to do a bad job explaining this but I’m gonna try my best
just because you’re drawing an anime face that you’ve made up yourself doesn’t mean you’re not drawing a face how someone else remembers a face. the idea is that instead of doing proper life studies to learn the anatomy of a face, then using that knowledge to stylize a face into something anime, she instead refuses to look at real life for her basis and instead only draws from knowledge of other anime styles.
that approach can have kind of an “insestuous” effect on your art. it takes the flaws of the artists you copy from and amplifies them, because you don’t have that base knowledge of real life anatomy to correct yourself with. ideally what any artist who seriously wants to go into art as a career would do is have a strong real life base while taking inspiration from many different artists with a variety of styles, even if you do just want to draw anime. Mary is caught up in a common pitfall of “I’m only interested in drawing anime so I will only draw anime”, which is fine if art is just a hobby, but not the greatest for an art class.
Very well put! And I agree with you completely. She is skipping the basics. Anime cartoons and even the characters in a single cartoon have a distinct difference in styles and features that set them apart from each other. If Mary is doing what you and Willis are implying, all of the people she draws probably have very similar looks to them. I’m inclined to believe this is the case since her current piece of art is slim while Malaya’s is more pudgy. Based on the teacher’s reaction, Malaya’s is probably the more accurate. If Mary was truly trying to convert what she is seeing into anime style, she should have made her drawing huskier. There are plenty of larger anime characters in existence, so it isn’t forbidden by the style. Instead, she is simply drawing a generic anime character with the correct hair style (maybe), hair color, skin color, and eye color.
Counterpoint:
I am no drawy person, but I did go through something similar.
I love romance novels and all their derivations (such as romance manga).
I particularly love fantasy romance novels (ie romance + magic).
Throughout highschool, undergrad, and (while less so) even occasionally in grad school, I had teachers – FUCKING TEACHERS – shitting on my writing because it was romance-related and telling me to get with that pretentious Iowa Writers crap.
And no, I was not just ‘parroting’ things back – I was deconstructing the genre and reconstructing it based on my own personal experiences. I was learning and developing a style while engaging with the genre that I love and care about most.
And I got treated to assholes like Malaya telling me how derivative and shit everything I wrote was not because of the quality of the writing but because of the genre I enjoyed writing in.
Can I write in other genres? Sure. But it’s BORING. I don’t like it. So whenever possible, I wrote fantasy romance (high, urban, historic – they’re all good).
I didn’t get any positive feedback from teachers until college, and even then only from one teacher, and only half-hearted because while she was okay with the fantasy elements, she still didn’t like the romance bent and tried to steer me away from it.
In gradschool, I finally met two more open-minded professors (one of whom introduced me to actual published LGBT romance novels, something I’d never seen before). But that was a long damn time of people being shitty to me.
And now I’m a published LGBT romance novelist and a professor of English, so –
**flips double birds at every teacher who shat on me**
Anyway, my point is that just because someone embraces a style does not mean that they aren’t using their experiences (such as a nude model) to hone and improve their ability. Again, I’m not a drawy person, so it IS possible that I’m missing some nuance here, but both Malaya and Mary had drawings in the same pose. It seemed to me that Mary was drawing the model – just in her own way.
I also want to point out that Malaya is NOT a reliable critic. Her entire characterization to this point is projecting her own insecurities onto others – ie calling Sal a “fake” when it is actually Malaya who feels like a fake. He critique of Mary may be just the same – not at all about Mary or her drawings but about Malaya and her issues with feeling disconnected from her own body.
Anyway, I’ve explained my own visceral reaction to this, so I’m gonna bail now. I don’t much like defending Mary, but in this, I feel for her. And I wish that my teachers had been half as supportive of me as hers is to her.
I think if you want to put Mary’s and Malaya’s drawings in writing terms, then Malaya knows more and more different words than Mary and can put them together in more, and more interesting, ways. Hers might not be as refined since Mary has been writing for longer, but Mary has a certain repertoire of words and expressions and keeps putting them together in the same patterns over and over.
Going back to the drawings from last strip. Mary has put nearly no effort into the body, it’s just some flat lines and a bit of shadow on the neck. She instead focused on the idealized anime face (complete with blush and everything). Also, she has chopped off the fingers and is ignoring whatever the model is leaning his hand on.
Malaya hasn’t even tried to draw the face beyond determining where the nose is pointing and where the ear is. She has put a lot of shadows on the body giving it depth and volume. She also has a lot more lines than Mary. She has drawn thin lines that weren’t quite right but close enough, then gone back and drawn thicker lines in better places.
In writing terms, Malaya first writes a draft, then goes back and starts changing things and making them closer to where she wants it to be. Mary has one style of writing and just hammers it out never changing anything.
I’m extremely not a writer so my perspective on your point might not be the most insightful, this is just what I’ve picked up from people I follow who talk about writing.
my understanding is that romance tends to be frowned upon because of stereotypes like “it’s all fluff”, “it’s easy and anybody can do it”, “it’s basically porn for women” when that is far from the truth. there’s nothing wrong with writing romance and there’s nothing wrong with drawing anime. both anime style art and romance novels can be extremely well executed, and they aren’t inherently worse than any other genre/style.
what Mary is doing though is less similar to writing in a genre that has negative stereotypes attached to it, and more similar to refusing to learn things like metaphor, symbolism or how to make a piece thematically coherent. the purpose of life studies is to practice your basics so you can apply them to your art later. they’re not really meant to be fun or a way to express yourself, they’re the boring practice stuff you gotta do to improve your skills. even just the artwork shown in the last strip, you can see that Mary’s art is a lot more stiff, like a drawing of a plastic doll. the character doesn’t have any weight to it, which is something she would be able to learn and improve on through doing her life studies properly. then when she drew anime boys later, they would look a lot more life-like.
of course it’s 1000% true that there are art professors that will poopoo anime styles no matter what, even if the art is for personal enjoyment and is excellent on a technical level. that’s always super lame when you get a professor like that, but that’s not what’s happening here. if she was handing in an assignment that met all of the criteria and also happened to be in an anime style, that would be a different story.
but yes I’ll leave it at this too, I don’t wanna drag it out either
Yo, I just wanna say that it’s really awesome you’re a published author of LGBT stories. That’s super awesome and fuck every professor who didn’t give your work a chance because of that. Thank you so much for sticking with it, the world needs more of what you’re putting out there. I only recently discovered that there are actually a decently large variety of publisehd works out there about people like me and, not gonna lie, I cried a little in relief after a childhood filled with characters who were (assumed to be) cishet.
However, as someone who is very much both a visual artist AND a writer, Angie is 100% on the nose. Mary isn’t just drawing art with an anime bent, from what we’ve been shown she consistently draws anime art BADLY. There’s a huge difference there that, as someone who also once drew stiff and visually uninspired anime art too, I can see. She’s not in control of her stylization, she’s a slave to it, as I once was. That’s pretty different from you being genre-savvy and completely cognizant of what writing ‘rules’ you were breaking. Stylization isn’t the same as genre choice, it really is much closer to figuring out how to effectively use metaphors/similes. (Thank you again to Angie for making that comparison! It really is perfect. Drawing really is all about figuring out what visual metaphors are the best for communicating the subject matter to your audience.)
I don’t want you to feel any pressure to respond to this, though, I see and respect why you’re upset and drained by this conversation. I’ve seen plenty of people who shit on anime art without even considering that it could possibly be good – and some of my absolute favorite art ever is by someone whose stuff is unquestionably anime-styled, so it totally bothers me too! ;~; ‘Anime’ should not be used as a catch-all for bad art/media, but it often is. Not to mention that, uh, the vast majority of my characters are LGBT, so I get the struggles you’re talking about too (though my writing partner and I aren’t published, so we haven’t had to fight publishers yet directly haha). But, while Malaya may not be the most unbiased messenger… what she’s saying is painfully #relatable as an artist who went from hobbyist to more serious halfway through learning art.
Again, no pressure to respond, I don’t want to draw this out if you’re not feeling up to it. I just wanted to add the perspective of someone who actually does both drawing and writing, since no one else had yet in this thread.
I may hate Mary, but I have been taking offense to everything Malaya has been saying for personal reasons. We are people, even if she reduces people to meat and bones like a Rick Sanchez edgelord. Even if Mary is not drawing realisticaly for the purpose of the class, I am highly triggered when other people accuse artists of drawing “anime style”. There are like hundreds of difefrent styles in anime, so I am horrible pissed when I hear comments like that.
Hah, that’s funny. This is maybe the first thing Malaya has said that doesn’t make me hate her. People are important, but we’re still just minds in meat suits. That’s not “edgy,” it’s just basic materialism.
As for the art, get over yourself. I enjoy “anime” styles as much as anybody (spent the evening watching some, as a matter of fact) but what Mary is doing is textbook bad art practice. She’s not drawing the model, she’s drawing her internalized style. That’s exactly what you’re NOT supposed to be doing when learning to draw, and is a well-known impediment to getting better as an artist. That she doesn’t recognize that she’s doing it is a major flaw. Nobody cares who’s style she’s copying, that’s no the point.
But she’s not saying that people are minds in meat suits. She’s saying we’re notpeople but minds in meat suits.
This is semantics. Her point is that while we think of a person by their physical form the actual entity that does all the experiencing of the world is the mind that’s currently occupying that body. There’s nothing particularly special or unique about any single person’s body, but their mind is a conscious entity capable of experience. She’s not denigrating people by acting like they’re worthless pieces of meat, she’s emphasising the mind over the physical vessel it happens to be carried by.
minds in meat suits isn‘t materialism though, it’s dualism．For materialism the meat suit is all there is, even if it can think
The minds are meat. The software isn’t.
I agree with you (regarding ‘anime style’ not being a monolith)… and also, unfortunately, have to disagree with you. I’m a huge proponent of artists drawing in whatever styles make them happy, so it really does pain me to say this! But…
As someone who, like Mary, started drawing with an anime-inspired bent, it’s been hard to unlearn those habits over the years. Thankfully I’ve been using photo references for the better part of ten years, so I’ve begun to take my art in a direction I feel is more nuanced than the art I poorly imitated as a kid, but… it’s still a struggle I’ve seen those who studied anatomy earlier bypass. I wish I’d learned to observe BEFORE actually jumping into drawing too much. Learning to draw and learning to see are two completely different skill sets.
To me, it’s definitely not about singling out anime as somehow lesser art – some of my favorite art is that of Shigenori Soejima, whose work for the Persona games would be unquestioningly recognized as anime. I also tend to strongly prefer at least slightly stylized art, so I’m not a snob who only likes realism (quite the opposite, I find most extremely realistic art pretty boring LOL). But when you do nothing but uncritically parrot another artist’s style, you aren’t learning WHY they stylized it a certain way. If you haven’t studied a variety of actual noses, and instead just copy specific angles of highly stylized noses, your ability to draw a more realistic nose if you ever do need to suffers.
And maybe you’ll never need to! It’s true that you can be a professional artist and not be very versatile. Or have a solid grasp on anatomy. But I think that’s what Malaya is getting at here, though of course in her characteristically antagonistic way: Malaya is actually analyzing what she’s given and mentally synthesizing it into something based on the source, while Mary is drawing the IDEA of a person. You can be incredibly successful as an artist by following that method, but I totally understand why Malaya is bringing up that critique in this environment specifically. Any other time, I’d agree it was rude, but… they’re in a class, ostensibly to learn.
I know a lot of art teachers have an inherent bias toward anime (but not American comics), and it sucks! I get it. :C But back when my drawings had an obvious anime inspiration, I had a figure drawing teacher who acted like theirs, and it didn’t help me grow as an artist at all.
It’s really what you do any time you practice drawing by drawing from a stylistic source instead of lifedrawing, regardless if it’s from a CGI series, a video game, an anime or a Disney movie.
If someone would practice drawing faces from these comics, they would essentially draw Willis’ memory of what a face looks like, not truly what a face looks like according to their own analysis.
Ooooh, nice catch! I hadn’t considered that angle.
Hmm. I’m noticing that a lot of people are pointing out a possible body dysphoria based on this comment. But she is absolutely correct from a life-model standpoint. Mary is drawing an idea of a person. Instead, she should be looking at the form in front of her. The point of a life model is to give artists a chance to see how the body is put together. To really be able to analyse it appropriately, you need to divorce yourself from preconceived notions and just draw what’s there. Look at the person in front of you, not as a person, but a sculpture of meat and bone. Then, you copy the lines of the sculpture.
If Mary has never drawn a turkey before, she would have to first find the form of what it is, then, once she has a good understanding of what makes a turkey what it is, convert it to an anime style. This would probably involve softening some lines and creating some new angles, but if it’s successful, it would be recognizable as both a turkey and an anime art style. It would probably be a great exercise to help Mary improve.
Damn, birds, when did you start flying?
Damn, dogs, when did you start barking?
Damn, cats, when did you start taking over the internet?
It’s the Internet; who can tell?
There’s an accuracy (not to mention substance) to Malaya’s comment that your average edgelord lacks.
In the placenta, probably.
When was she ever not edgelordy?
“The wolf was only trying to help!”–DUE SOUTH
Do you have a wolf license for it?
In all fairness, the wolf is deaf. So he might have misread the instructions.
Oh. My. God.
I thought I made up Due South! I was all set to pitch it to a network and everything! Bless you, kind human!
Welp, that’s some Grade A body dysphoria right there.
Is it? I thought it was more like philosophical physicalism.
More of a sexual fetish?
She is talking about the mind and body being entirely separate – about her mind puppeting a meat-sack, effectively. That implies both that she feels entirely separate from her body and that she assumes others feel as she does.
Combine this with the “Sal’s a faker – wait I’m also a faker” stuff from earlier and my read some serious body dysphoria.
Also, for reference, I may be using the wrong medical term. Not a doctor. I was taking the term “gender dysphora” – ie, feeling like you are in the wrong body – and extrapolating “body dysphora” – ie, feeling disconnected from one’s body. There may be a more correct term, so sorry if that caused confusion.
I guess you’re right. What I was getting at is that part of what she’s saying is that people are minds and bodies, and there’s no such thing as a soul. Which I agree with, so maybe I just read it that way because it’s part of my worldview.
There’s some dualism beyond the typical materialist position (the mind being housed in the brain which is also meat), but the general position of a brain being the more central component of self with the body a glorified meat vehicle? That’s pretty standard, and hardly edgy.
Plus, in the context of a figure drawing class the actual particulars of meat vehicle construction are pretty important to learning the basics of art. Stylization in any style is generally best added afterwards.
It sounds more like depersonalization to me, but could have been developed due to body dysphoria
Jesus Christ, yeah. That’s dissociation. She thinks it’s normal for people to feel like their bodies aren’t really a part of their identity.
Ah – looks like some people already came up with more correct terms while I was typing that massive explanation.
I’m perfectly at home in my body, but I don’t think my body is really part of my identity. I remember when I was drafted towards the end of the Vietnam war and one of the first things they did was to give us a close haircut. For some of my long-haired friends it changed their conception of who they were. I didn’t understand that, and I still don’t. I’m me. Cut my hair off or grow it long and then put me in pigtails, whatever, it’s not going to change who I am. Put me in a body of the other sex and it may take me awhile to adjust to the new plumbing, but otherwise my identify is not changing a great deal. My body is not me. I’m used to my body and comfortable with it, though not happy about the fact that after 70 years it’s starting to wear out a little around the edges. Give me a chance to trade it in on a new model without harming someone (say by evicting them) and I’m definitely considering it. I don’t think minds piloting carcasses is all that we are, but otherwise, she’s not wrong. This isn’t Malaya being edgelordy, this is Malaya being helpful, albeit Malaya-style.
In the immortal words of RUN-DMC (by way of The Monkees):
“Mary, Mary, Why ya buggin’?!”
I wouldn’t mind seeing the picture described by the alt-text.
We need to make “anime man wolves” the character in this month’s Patreon strip.
Mary does her best work in the service of spite.
I honestly have no idea if Malaya is giving out good advice, spouting nonsense or just being an edgelord but if it pisses of Mary I’m all for it.
She is giving legitimate advice, but her motives are probably just to be an edgelord and burst Mary’s bubble
Only actual advice she’s giving here is that Mary is caught up in what she think human’s look like, which has been 18 years of seeing an object without analyzing it so you have some vague idea of the shapes without understanding the construction, and her drawing relies on everybody else also seeing these generic shapes and shortcuts to understand that it’s a human body they’re looking at.
But I don’t actually think Malaya understands herself that that was useful, her personal philosophy regarding bodies just happens to put her in a mindset that lets her advance at a faster rate in art because she doesn’t have a lot of bad habits to unlearn.
Her attitude is edgelordy and unhelpful. But she’s not wrong. To draw the human body well, you need to break it down and understand how it all goes together. You get much more realistic poses and proportions when you understand the skeleton and how the muscles overlay it and move, and how the skin behaves and where fat commonly distributes and, where applicable, how breasts actually look and move. It’s not uncommon to be assigned a series of studies of single body parts.
So Malaya’s not wrong. She’s just a jerk.
“You draw someone else’s memory of a face” is the sickest art-related burn I’ve heard
Right? That’s the kind of crit that’d make some people run crying and throw their sketchbook in the trash, there.
I agree. She may not be correct as to Mary’s internal process, but she’s obviously given it some thought, and has some insight. She has depths that have not been apparent before.
Careful, Malaya. You might end up cutting yourself on all that edge.
I would make a snarky comment about manga being literature, but it cuts too close to the actual comic.
Ah well.
Tea and cupcakes anyone?
I am still wondering what anime’s Mary’s hyper Christian Parents let her watch
This implies that they know she watches it
Superbook’s the obvious answer. Pokemon and Miyazaki movies are probably a safe bet.
Fruits Basket? Bleach? Fullmetal Alchemist? I’m just spitballing here.
(I could see Mary watching the stuff her parents wouldn’t approve of, but being all hypocritical about it.)
Miyazaki, that hippie?! With all his pacifism and environmentalism and movies about spirits and things?!
Actually, I kinda wonder if Mary’s parents aren’t super chill, and she’s the only right-winger in the family, sorta like Alex in Family Ties. Only worse because she’s Mary instead of Michael J Fox.
Could be. My mother had a friend who raised her daughter non-religiously. At 14, that daughter converted to an ultra traditionalist (Vatican II rejecting) Catholic faith.
That’s when my no-longer-religious mother decided to raise us as Unitarians.
When I went through my fundamentalist phase, it wasn’t my parents’ fault. It wasn’t even my church’s fault. I was just taking the bones of what their beliefs were built on and pushing them to an extreme conclusion. There were plenty of people in my orbit that encouraged and enabled it, but it didn’t come from any kind of indoctrination. (That’s part of why it was so easy for me to leave that phase; it was my choice to go down that road, so it was my choice to leave it. I decided that I cared about people more than I cared about feeling intellectually superior about eschatology. Look, I was a teenager.)
I feel like Willis said that this was the case a few years ago.
Something to that effect.
Likely religious, but “super chill” by the standards of Joyce’s family.
Willis might’ve changed his mind (I know he has in the past regarding the subject of whether this universe’s Amber has half-siblings), but I believe he’s mentioned before that Mary’s parents are good people – and that Mary is just the sort of person who took all the wrong lessons to heart.
the true Anti-Joyce.
And this is why you should read all the comments to make sure someone else hasn’t already said the same thing your saying but better. Oops.
Do we know that Mary’s parents were as strict as Joyce’s?
Oops, I didn’t read all the comments when I typed that. Sorry.
Of all the places I thought this would go, a theological debate is not one of them.
It’s Mary. A potential theological debate is just one inevitable and centi-hourly religious dump away.
Assertion of dogma, absolutely. Actual theological debate? I don’t think Mary has that concept within her.
Mary’s concept of theological debate is: “You are going to Hell.”
She is of course absolutely correct. People who believe humans are made in the image of god tend to forget (or actively dismiss the idea) that we are still animals.
We ignore that reality at our peril.
And Mary thinks that the image of God is an anime bishōnen.
What a ghastly idea. Please go sit in a corner.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, though.
If God is so bishie, where is his sparkle?
I’m really imagining Mary’s drawing yesterday as half of the Sistine Chapel’s “Two Masculine Guys Touching Fingers”.
> If God is so bishie, where is his sparkle?
Halo.
Rainbows!
Hmm… that means that she probably has the same Manga Bible (New Living Translation) I have then. I never could reconcile a bishounen Jesus and Isaiah 53’s prophecy.
I am not surprised that exists, but I am still amazed.
I disagree with Malaya, unless she is expressing body dysphoria. People aren’t the image of a god, nor anime characters, but they are more than the atoms of their bodies. They have feeling, memories, families, friends, enemies, talents, likes, dislikes, personalities, perceptions, dreams, hopes, fears, love, etc. Shallow materialism cant reach all those experiences, and that is why Edward and Alphose failed to recreate their mother.
Yeah, but they had no problem with having their mother as a portrait lying around.
All that would be part of ‘mind’. She didn’t say just atoms, she said “minds piloting upright carcasses”.
Sorry but what the fuck are they saying? o_o I don’t understand
A rough translation:
“You’re not drawing what’s actually there, you’re just slapping a How To Draw Animu face onto a shitty model sketch. Also religion is fake.”
“Go step on a lego.”
It was French. I don’t understand French.
Well, let’s see.
On Reading #1, Malaya’s criticizing Mary’s art style. Malaya says that Mary should look at human bodies and see meat (muscle, skin, bones, etc) and draw that, rather than seeing and drawing people, as a way to produce more realistic renderings. Malaya says that Mary’s just copying someone else’s art style rather than making her own art. Mary counters by seeing Malaya as meat for wolves.
On Reading #2, Mary suggests an original-sin concept of moral evil and Malaya counters with a nihilistic and materialist world view. Malaya says Mary is lost in a visage of past philosophy and therefore blinded to reality. Mary then counters with a world view of Malaya’s material ripped apart by wolves. Bad Mary! It’s ripped apart by bears! Be Biblical!
On Reading #3, Malaya is torn between her anticipations for the upcoming holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving, and talking about drawing turkeys and zombies.
On Reading #4, Mala- *vaudeville hook*
Hoist by your own vaudeville hook! I’m impressed!
Impressed as well, even before the hook.
Both are assholes, with one seeing things with jaded eyes and a toxic tongue, and the other being a brimstone preacher bigot.
P.S. while Malaya’s view is materialistic in the technical sense of that word, I don’t see it as nihilistic. The fact that we are flesh and blood (and therefore doomed to die) does not mean life is purposeless and pointless. We can make our own meaning.
Rejecting that we are people is still a douchy thing. It’s like saying a person is just their body, like when Joe tried to justify objectifying people, but Joyce revealed to hime when rapey mcdouchebag saw her as an object.
Or ripped apart by lions, lions are biblical.
Whoever wins, we lose
I don’t care who wins. I just want it to go the distance.
Is that a subtle Red Dwarf reference? Because even if it wasn’t intentional, I read it as a subtle Red Dwarf reference and laughed.
S03E06 “The Last Day” for non Red Dwarf persons.
It may have been a little intentional. But you know Lister had a point there.
Honestly, that sounds like the sort of thing someone who likes to engage in casual cannibalism and wear flesh masks would say.
“Someone else’s memory of a face” – what..? I don’t get it.
She’s drawing what she has seen other people draw, instead of the subject in front of her.
Or at least that’s how I read it.
It’s a shot at Mary borrowing someone else’s style rather than developing her own.
Which is BS because, for many people, taking on an anime or manga style IS their style. I know someone who can dash off anime-style drawings from her own brain in a matter of moments that look fucking professional.
Which is fine when you’re doing that, but sticking to that style in this life drawing class isn’t exactly helping her to grow as an artist.
Yeah, but that’s not what Mary is supposed to be doing here. She’s drawing the same thing over and over with no improvement.
It’s not about her borrowing someone’s style, but that she is copying a style without understanding the underlying reasons for the stylistic choices, which makes you just stray further away from the theory behind said artistic choices until you have a mess that is barely readable.
Lets take the reflection in eyes as an example. An easy beginner mistake is mirroring a set of white spots from the other eye you drew, since everything else is mirrored pretty much. This disregards completely that the white spots are reflection from a light source bouncing off a shiny/wet surface in the shape of a ball, and not a part of the bilateral body symmetry, and can be enough for the human brain to register there is something uncanny with the drawing without people being able to pinpoint what is wrong, just that /something/ is wrong.
You need to be able to understand the rules in art to be able to break them the right way/taking shortcuts. Otherwise it’s not artistic choices, it’s just a pile of mistakes and laziness.
I’m not saying that she necessarily is gonna be bad at drawing anime, but that if she is still drawing anime in a lifedrawing class and doesn’t even try to break out of it to do lifedrawing, then she’s just sitting and doing all the shortcuts she already knew without working on her technique, and she’s expecting to be able to ride on those shortcuts
Oh. Mary is the Walky of Art.
Exactly!
In seven words you’ve cut to the chase and summed up over half the comments here. Respect.
^ THIS
These are absolutely things I wish I’d known when I started getting more serious about art.
Malaya is mid2000s internet forum edgelord
Turkeys make me think of Jeph’s annual turkey comics.
Carcass isn’t the word I would use because it implies that they are already dead and doesn’t really get across the purpose of the body, maybe machine,
Gonna be real, I wanna see the anime wolves
https://myanimelist.net/character/7373/Holo/pictures
The thought of those cute creatures tearing Malaya apart is rather dark.
Holo’s true form: https://theproductofprimes.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/holowolf.jpg
I’m imagining that horse being extremely nervous.
Every horse on Earth should be nervous, right about now. We’re about five years away from putting them on the menu.
I think you mean putting them BACK on the menu.
They are already on the menu in plenty of countries. They are just different breeds than what we see at the race track, etc. You don’t automatically eat a good dairy animal, same thing with specialized horses. Exceptions for over abundance, age, injury, etc.
Didn’t figure Malaya to be an Evangelion fan…
It’s sort of intriguing watching these two interact, because Malaya has all the likeability of a wild hog and Mary is Mary, and Malaya treats Mary the sort of way Mary treats everyone else except flippantly, while Mary is completely unable to hurt Malaya in any way, so strips like today come out like something from an Ingmar Bergman film.
You say that like wild hogs aren’t likable! I liked the one that kept peeing on Sawyer’s stuff in LOST anyway.
Depends on how many wild hogs are involved. Get to around 30-50, and you have problems. Or so people say now and then.
Well, if those hogs are around where your children are playing, I believe you can solve that problem only by opening fire on them all for 3-5 minutes.
Hm. I think there’s a problem with that somewhere, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.
The problem is that you only spotted one problem.
The movie wasn’t bad, it had it’s moments.
In the 5th century BC, Plato supposedly defined a human as a “featherless biped.”
Ecce homo.
With broad, flat nails.
Man’s a kind
of Missing Link,
fondly thinking
he can think.
— PIet Hein
“Wisest wise man” – modest, we are not.
“Ecchi homo”? I hardly knew ‘er.
Ecce homo qui est faba.
*sings the Chicken Boo theme song*
(That’s the SECOND TIME TODAY I’ve done that in response to a Diogenes reference…)
These two Deserve Each other. It’s glorious.
What exactly would an anime face on a wolf even look like? Just a normal wolf face but with kawaii blush marks?
Dunno, let’s head over the good ol’ Deviant art to find out.
NOT SAFE FOR WORK AT ALL!!!!!!!
(I mean, technically I suppose it is but come on, don’t browse deviant art at work unless you have a really forgiving boss)
https://www.deviantart.com/search?page=1&q=wolf%20anime
The Internet was a mistake.
The Internet was a glorious mistake.
Fixed that for you.
I don’t know what I expected to happen.
By and large the same scantily-clad (if at all) anime female bodies as always, just with furry ears and sometimes a bushy tail in order to distinguish “wolves” from “cats”. Seems like not just Mary needs a cue from Malaya.
There are some actual wolves in an anime style, which I guess would qualify.
But I was thinking more like wolf body with human anime face. Best if the wolf part is highly realistic.
I sort of want to say a dog. But I think anime wolves might actually go in the other direction.
I just thought it would be realistic looking wolves, except with really big eyes and hair colours that don’t exist in nature.
You would expect Malaya to actually give advice on how to draw realistically or to not be bigoted… TOO BAD! PSYCHE! It doesn’t matter if you are good or evil, or talented or untalented, Malaya will destroy your hopes and dreams with the same cruelty as Mike, but without creative comebacks or harsh truths. She is just a queen bongo, but if she turns out tobe a trans person then they will be a monarch asshole.
I am not defending Mary, she is an asshole too.
I think “you should be drawing turkeys” is a bit of advice, if not terribly detailed. It would get Mary away from preconceptions about stylized human form, and looking at what’s actually there. Maybe. Not many anime turkeys, anyway.
They’re both so obnoxiously pretentious but in completely different ways. It’s quite interesting to see honestly.
Edgelord vs Bigot. The fight of the week. Followed by Danny vs Mike in a bachelor contest.
Clearly one of these two ladies is having an existential crisis. I just can’t tell which one…
I’d say they each have problems with the other existing.
They both tend to have that effect on people.
If you guys aren’t people, Malaya, then who are people?
People are people, and people are piles of secrets.
But enough talk! Have at you!
*wineglass*
“someone else’s memory of a face”
JUST TAKE A LOOK AT ME NOOOOW – THERE’S JUST AN EMPTY SPAAACE
We’re a brain piloting a skeleton mecha wearing meat armor!
Or maybe we’re just a meat-race.
We’re the empty space in the rain.
There’s a skeleton inside of you RIGHT NOW.
Also the average number of skeletons in people is greater than one.
Sure, just swallow a mouse whole.
I’m sure you meant pregnant people, but that’s the boring way.
That actually sounds pretty badass.
Watching these comments choose between Mary and Malaya is the most amazing social experiment.
Mary is evil, but she’s hot. Malaya is an asshole, but she’s hot. How does one choose?
I’d want to hit them both if they were real, but they’re not and they’re bugging each other and it’s hilarious.
Hell is other people. Assholes having to deal with each other is better than inflicting themselves on decent people. They depend on other people being better than they are–and sometimes they’re not.
Also ew.
By picking the one who isn’t a raging bigot who blackmailed someone nearly to suicide?
as far as I can tell, this counts as helpful advice and sincere support on planet Malaya.
So why does she care? Why is little miss “too cool to care about anyone else” bothered about wether or not Mary learns how to draw “proper” (whatever that means). Is it just professional pride? don’t want to see talants squandered? Did she herself go through an an-ey-mey-phase in middle school and hate to see someone else stuck in the same rut?
In their last class together, Mary implied that Malaya must be less skilled than her, offering her advice and pointers without even checking how Malaya’s technique looked, saying she would be happy to help out a novice. She’s still in the mindset of “the gifted one” that artistic kids easily get if they are the best one at art in elementary school (Her saying last time “I’ve always had a gift”), and hasn’t understood yet that in this setting, being an art major amongst other art people, her skills are probably mediocre.
Malaya just wants to push Mary into that realisation (and existential crisis) asap. Not for Mary’s own good so she can break down and then rise up from the bad habits that are keeping her down, but because nobody should try and pretend that they are better than they are, how dare they!
I suppose… but does Malaya really care about other people pretending they are better than they are?
I know she does it constantly to Sal, but at least in my reading that has more to do with what Malaya projects on Sal rather than a general attitude about how other people should behave.
“a human being is just a machine made of meat…”
(Youtube link to the very silly song Slay Ride feautering grave robbing, zombification and chritmas tunes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiKYsRd2NaM
They’re made out of meat
“Jellyfish are like hot air balloons… being piloted by plants.”
–Something a friend of mine said once.
…fair
Very metal Malaya.
Malaya:I’m just meat! I’m just meat! I’m meat that has opinions and one day I’ll die!
Wow! For once a majority of readers agree with Mary. Well a broken clock is right twice a day.
Unless it is a digital clock, then it is just blank.
Unless it’s flashing 12:00. Then it’s still right twice a day.
DoA Book 10: We’re Not People, We’re Minds Pilotin’ Upright Carcasses, Assembled From Meat And Bone
I’m with Malaya. She’s objectifying the model so that Mary will draw what she sees rather than drawing yet another rendition of her concept of “man.” Because Malaya depersonalized the model, she was able to catch details to make those “impressive contours.” Malaya is learning as she sketches something different each time. Mary just repeats what’s in her head, reinforcing that habit and not progressing.
Yet again, well put. If we scrape a layer of asshole off of what Malaya said, it was good artistic advice.
I’m a meat mech!
Malaya is in the frame to be a future Francis Bacon or Egon Schiele.
The other one will be disappointed.
Not trying to get into a philosophical discussion with Malaya, but if we aren’t people then who is?
Malaya is a bit of a misanthrope. Attributing a philosophical value to human life might be something she doesn’t want to do.
Heh, it’s what you think it’s worth on a philosophical level. Hard value is half a bag of rice.
It’s just like Syndrome said: “When everybody is people, nobody will be.”
Well, Malaya, in all honesty not everyone is any good at drawing from life. It looks like Mary is better at being an illustrator than a portraitist.
You still need to learn the anatomy if you want to be good at illustration and that’s what life drawing classes are for.
Once you’ve done that, then you can stylize it as you choose and it will still make sense.
Otherwise, you end up as Rob Liefeld.
Sounds to me like Malaya is priming Mary for progress a lot more effectively than her art teacher is.
“We’re all just brains in bodies, maaaaan.” Thanks, fourteen year old stoner, we’d all be lost without your unparalleled insight.
“Anime isn’t real people.” Whoa, stand the fuck back, everybody. This girl is tearing apart the very foundations of society and inventing a brand new paradigm from scratch.
Thank you, I shall be writing that down for future use…
…wow, willis, you made me side with mary. I feel dirty now. I hope your happy
Mmm, Malaya being torn apart by wolves…
Wait, the wolves all have stupid anime eyes! Ugh! Image ruined.
*sigh* shoulda read the alt-text first…
Gotta say, as someone who’s had a long-running antagonistic relationship with my body (health and disability-related), I actually find Malaya’s dissociation thing here really relatable? But yeah, probably not a particularly healthy attitude to have toward your physical form. Probably is useful in drawing what you see, though.
Heh, wish I was a better communicator. Malya is right, mary is severely screwed up in the head and yes. When you get down to it, we are all nothing but thoughts stimulating the chemicals in a meat sack. We are just (and I’m going to get this all wrong and the philosophy majors and ancient greek phd’s are going to ream me hard) meme moving meat.
I’m not quite sure how to parse that last. Are you saying that meat moves the memes or that memes move the meat? Not disagreeing either way. It’s like in general relativity where the geometry tells the mass/energy where to go and the mass/energy tells the geometry where to go.
memes = thoughts.
I’m not entirely sure what Malaya’s talking about, but based on the few drawings I’ve seen Mary do she does need a firmer understanding of anatomy. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary.
Now I want to see Mary’s drawing on Malaya. The boy behind her looks rather terrified. Maybe she’s really good at drawing people who suffer or are tortured and murdered with cruelty.
Malaya‘s nihilism aside, she‘s spot on about how to draw. Abstraction is key to understand the actual shapes and inner workings of something. She is totally right about the memory thing.
For all her faults, Malaya really knows her shit when it comes to drawing. Nice to see a redeeming quality on her.
Oh come on Mary, that is not Biblical! Now bears… mauled by bears is Biblical.
Oh my God are they going to humanize each other?!?!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are robots made of meat. “Meat-robots”, if you will
One doesn’t need body dysmorphia to feel or understand this concept/fact. But somebody who HAS experienced that is probably more likely to intuitively understand or realize it
And no, it doesn’t mean the mind is separate from the body. We have scientific data that strongly indicates otherwise. The mind-body connection is very real and demonstrable
And even more no, it doesn’t mean there’s no soul or spiritual component to a human. We have NO scientific data to indicate it, but the soul/spirit is a matter of Faith and Philosophy, not science and anatomy
You are late to that epiphany. The movie “Meatrobolis” was already done in 1927.
“Late to the Ephpiphany”
+1!
Better than late to the immanent Eschaton.
I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a manga style drawing of Malaya torn apart by wolves.
Yeah, she’s got the moral high ground in this conversation, but it’s still a cool image.
I didn’t know Malaya was so smart.
Thank you. Whether or not I agree in a philosophical sense (it’s complicated), that’s a really good way of explaining how her drawing of the model and Mary’s are quite different. Malaya is drawing the object in front of her which just so happens to be a person, Mary is drawing a person which looks nothing like the object in front of her.
^^ and ^: Thanks for putting it to words!
FYI: I’m wearing my “Magneto Made Some Valid Points” tshirt.
I don’t know much about art, but, my take:
Malaya’s “assembled from meat and bone” reminds me of Chuck Jones’ autobiography where he remarks that drawing figures in a realistic-for-the-medium manner was a must for would-be animators. Bugs Bunny isn’t out of Grey’s Anatomy, but all the weight, motion, space, and gravity in a good cartoon starts with stuff like Malaya’s sketch shown yesterday.
She has that down, whether she can draw human (or anthropomorphic) expression we don’t know.
Not that I’m defending Mary at all… but anytime someone starts with a sentence, “Do you know what your problem is?”… they’re not actually going to be talking about YOUR problem. Nor are they actually trying to help you.
But it IS Malaya, so I guess it’s to be expected?
Do you know what your problem is?
I have no idea, I just thought I’d put that out there.
My problem is that I think that Malaya isn’t all that inaccurate about Mary’s art problem.
behold, plato’s Malaya!
To be honest, a Mary redemption arc could be kind of interesting.
Do not want.
unpopular opinion but can we let the teacher be the only one who teaches people how to Art
(yes i realize this is a comic and all that but i have a Thing about students who try to teach people things and sort of undermine (for lack of a better word) the teacher. i have been That Student and learned that no one likes that)
I mean, the teacher isn’t doing it, though.
I mean… this is a sub-one-minute snapshot of a conversation within a single class, so I’d say we don’t really have enough information to know whether the teacher is doing it.
I concur with JBento, the teacher isn’t doing his job. You don’t just make a vague statement to the whole class and hope the relevant student picks up on it, you *talk to* the student in question. “I like it”, “that’s a good drawing” etc are USELESS comments that, when our teachers have been telling us how to make a proper critique, they told us to NOT USE EVER as they are unhelpful.
Also, your fellow students are your greatest resource in art school. Everyone is at a different level and you can learn from and be INSPIRED by each other.
So, is Malaya saying that the best way to draw a human is to trace your hand and draw a face on it?
Mary would still give it big anime eyes and weird proportions.
Malaya is… trying to help ?
This is actually very good drawing advice. Everyone is inclined to draw what they think something looks like, instead of actually drawing the shapes that they’re seeing in front of them, and your memory lies to make things easier to keep track of. One example: your iris doesn’t appear perfectly round. The top and bottom are slightly hidden by your eyelids. But if someone tries to draw an eye without consciously looking at a reference, they often don’t remember that.