[Kojiro Highwind]

Originally Posted by Zambino

This. This. This. Starting off as an artist by looking at those books is gonna leave you with some serious fundamental flaws in your work that are gonna be hard to unlearn. The proportions are comically skewed, the poses are stiff and unnatural, and the faces... dear god, the people in those books have enormous triangular eyes and what appears to be a lump of cartilage that extends across the entire lower half of the face.

You're essentially learning how to draw from a 15-year-old girl, who learned how to draw from watching anime. You really want that as a starting point?

So my advice to you would be to ditch anime for a bit, and come back to it as a stylism once you've got actual realism down pat (or better yet, find your own style- anime's extremely overdone). Hard shit, but you have to have a pretty solid bedrock if you wanna go far.

And one more thing, no matter how "rude" criticism may seem, it's still criticism, and you can still learn from it. Peel away the layers of meanness that accompany any critique of your work, and you're bound to find something that can help you. It doesn't really matter if it's constructive or not- if they don't tell you how to fix the flaws that they point out, you figure it out for yourself! That, in itself, is another part of improving as an artist.

I got my drawing skill from drawing mostly anime/manga style things >_> and i used 1-2 things from those books <_< and my pics aren't deadish stiff. I had to say something about that.