Spiralbunny wrote:
No, I'm not. Remember what you said - "if people like the way it looks", not "if it looks good". I'm saying that having (some, many, a few) people like the way something looks doesn't mean that there's a reason to draw it that way.
And I'm talking about
the artist. When I said "if people like the way it looks", I meant "if those people are drawing something, and they like the way it looks".
"Looking good" is an entirely subjective thing -there's no such thing as an absolute metric for "looking good", so it's entirely down to the individual. What I'm saying is that if the artist thinks that it looks good to have the eyes drawn over the hair, that is enough of a reason for that artist to draw the eyes over the hair.
Spiralbunny wrote:
I do bear that in mind, and I don't state it as any sort of universal, general fact, but rather - yes - as my own opinion. When I talk, I tend to speak for myself, as do many others?
It's a wording thing. "X is horrible" is a statement of absolute fact; "I think X is horrible" is a statement of opinion. It doesn't matter that much, 'cause mostly people will be able to work out for themselves which bits you intend to state as opinions and which bits you intend to state as facts, but it's polite to phrase your opinions as opinions, particularly when you're essentially saying to someone "you did it wrong" about something subjective.
Spiralbunny wrote:
I have to ask about your way of thinking, out of curiosity - the fact that a lot of people (and not just you and me, I know quite a few others) don't like eyes-over-hair doesn't mean that there's good enough reason not to draw like that?
. . .
I think you're totally missing the point. It's not about what
I like, or what
you like - it's about what the artist likes, since it's a stylistic decision and they're the one who's making it.
If I didn't like the manga style, then it would be completely unhelpful and unproductive for me to write a critique of someone's manga art which said "I think the manga style is horrible and you should have drawn it in a realist style instead". It would be worse than useless, in fact - it could come across as quite insulting. The artist obviously likes the manga style because they elected to draw a picture in it. Human beings don't have eyes the size of fists, and they don't have hair which magically becomes totally transparent when it passes in front of eyes, but both of these things are stylistic choices - if the artist has elected to make those choices, it's totally worthless to point out that you don't agree with them in a critique.
The fundamental point here is that a critique - constructive criticism - is intended to help the artist develop their skill in the direction
they want to develop it in, it's not for the world at large to impose their tastes upon the artist. I don't like cubism, but if I were critiquing a cubist painting that would be totally irrelevant, because the artist has chosen cubism and they want to know how to improve their cubism, not whether I prefer it to art nouveau or not.
Spiralbunny wrote:
Personal preferences can be as helpful as general advice, and both can be useless, as well.
. . . how, exactly? If you ask me to tell you whether the cake you've baked is a good cake or not, it's totally irrelevant whether or not I happen to like cake. Telling you that you should have spent that time cooking steak instead is unhelpful, because you already decided to make a cake.
Maybe if you were asking what I wanted for dinner, it would be relevant. But generally speaking, I'd say it's probably a bad idea to encourage artists to develop only in the direction that pleases the most people, because then we would end up with all art looking the same. And it probably wouldn't be manga-style at all, because interest in manga is still in the minority worldwide.
Spiralbunny wrote:
Edited to add (I like doing that, don't I): And Jake, I just re-read your critique on the image - in my opinion, what you said about the chin being more round than pointy is more personal ideas than general. There are lots of "manga artists" that don't use pointy chins to express femininity. Some do, some don't.
Actually, I was stating an anatomical fact about human beings - generally speaking, human females tend to have wider cheekbones, more oval faces leading to sharper, more-pointy angles around the chin. Human males tend to have squarer, more thick-set jaws and chins.
I wasn't intending to directly state that a stylistic decision was 'wrong' (or 'horrible') because it wasn't clear that a stylistic decision had been taken. As best I could tell, she'd not deliberately given the character a stocky face; if she had, then the point that she's missing some element of femininity still stands, I've just picked the wrong thing to suggest to fix it.