Spiralbunny wrote:
And, I don't understand what the point was of the "(...) and it probably wouldn't be manga-style at all" comment? Just curious.
I meant that if all artists ever did get persuaded by popular opinion to change their styles to match what most people wanted to see, then they wouldn't end up drawing manga-style art at all, because most people don't want to see manga-style art.
Spiralbunny wrote:
Jake wrote:Actually, I was stating an anatomical fact about human beings
Yes, exactly; that's what I had a problem with, since you already said that "manga style" isn't always anatomically correct. Thus your comment should be more personal-preference than general, in your opinion, and so you shouldn't have said it at this time.
... except that the manga style still is supposed to be representing human beings, and as much as it may not appear to at first glance, it still typically follows more human anatomy 'rules' than it ignores. One one hand, the typical manga-drawn human has huge eyes; on the other hand, those eyes are typically the same size and roughly symmetrical.
Sure, there will always be one-off exceptions here and there for individual artists, but one can only really speak about something as wide-ranging as 'manga-style art' in general terms.
Wintermoon wrote:
Are you saying that stylistic choices are categorically above criticism? If so, I'm going to have to disagree.
Not really. I'm saying that when you're critiquing an image, there are things which are far more useful to mention than other things. And sure, nothing is absolutely, 100% never useful at all ever, but generally speaking things which are clear stylistic decisions on the part of the artist have been made because the artist wanted to make them, and thus they typically form part of the 'objective' of the piece of art, and the point of a critique is generally to point out things which could have been done differently to better reach that objective.
Sure, sometimes an artist makes stylistic decisions which contradict what their objective is, either because they simply didn't consider an alternative or because they weren't paying attention or whatever... but I doubt the action of drawing an eye above or below hair can be done while intending the complete opposite without noticing at all, and it's typically obvious at the sketch stage what effect it's going to have.
Really, what I was originally objecting to is the kind of critique which says "this looks horrible because you have made this stylistic choice which gels entirely with all the other stylistic choices you have made except for the fact that I personally don't like it". Because that falls at the same end of the helpful scale as "no your picture is crap because you drew a tractor and I only like looking at pictures of girls".