Anime Clay
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For years I have actively searched through the internet for anime art to adore. After creating a large collection of my favorite artists, I decided it could be nice to share.
In America, I feel that much of the anime fandom neglects the artists and their style and pays more attention to the characters -- often paying no respect to the artist/source even if they like it. As an artist myself, this makes me pretty upset. I made this blog hoping to change that around.
You can call me Miq,
Enjoy the artists, here at Anime Clay.
With a serious affinity for machines and architecture, the artist LDT exhibits a variety of realism, surrealism, and anime art. A common subject in much of LDT’s work is a series of anthropomorphized Taiwanese trains — which make for some interesting characters with strong human personalities despite their heavily mechanical appearance. When not focused on these characters, LDT’s images take on anime characters, themes, and styles, with some notable influence from his typical subject matter. LDT’s work has fascinated and impressed me for some time, but their most recent image (the first image here, of Megaman) has really blown me away with something unexpected and new; I can’t wait to see what comes next.
One of the very best Pokemon artists, like no one ever was, Pearl7 has devoted the majority of their art and skill to a massive amount of stunning Pokemon fan art. Incredibly, Pearl7 has drawn every Pokemon up through 4th generation (493 Pokemon) and has begun on 5th generation, typically drawing each Pokemon individually, using an attack, with no background.
Being a huge Pokemon fan myself, it is exciting to see the work of an artist who is not only very skilled but also interested in adding to the games themselves by interpreting the Pokemon and their attacks in a lot more detail than what is available in the games. Pearl7 has developed an effective style for conveying action and movement, giving the attack’s of each Pokemon plenty of energy and fluidity with the detailed shapes of grass, fire, water, and so on. I personally love how Pearl7 gives each Pokemon a toy-like plasticity with the smooth shading and bright shines; the look keeps the Pokemon feeling stylistically cartoony, unifying them all with a look that is similar to the original Sugimori art but still uniquely different and recognizable.
(update) Note: This artist also goes/went by “Pearl Mode”.
Kim Hyung-Tae has become the most well known Korean anime artist, defining the Korean style of anime (as opposed to Japanese styles) that has influenced artists worldwide and expanded the anime style as a whole. As one of the first artists who I owned an art book by and knew by name, I feature Kim Hyung-Tae’s art work again here on Anime Clay as one of the artists I know best and admire most.
Kim Hyung-Tae’s main work is in character design, designing the characters of the Magna Carta series and the upcoming MMORPG Blade & Soul (which I would highly recommend checking out if you like Kim Hyung-Tae’s aesthetic, because it is an entire world of it with a lot of customization). His characters have a truly unique feel to them, typically having an incredible amount of detail and complexity. There is a quality to the materials and forms of his designs that feel thick and heavy to me which I can best describe as “clay-like”. This clay-like quality is perhaps most obvious in the hair of his characters, which are rich in form and smooth with a heavy liquidity.
The other quintessential aspect of Kim Hyung-Tae’s art is his extremely stylized and exaggerated anatomy. I have heard a lot of people complain about and attack the anatomy of Kim Hyung-Tae, and every time I am confused. People seem to act as if Kim Hyung-Tae is trying to be realistic, and judge his art based on how inaccurate it is to realistic anatomy. I do not understand how anyone could think that Kim Hyung-Tae was ever trying to be accurate. Furthermore, I do not understand why anyone demands realistic anatomy from any artist of the anime style — a defining part of anime is to stylize and exaggerate anatomy. Even outside of anime, artists have been distorting the human body for centuries, in sexual and non-sexual ways, at times much further than Kim Hyung-Tae. With those contradictory critics aside, I admire Kim Hyung-Tae for his extreme twist on anatomy and the balance that he has found between expressive forms and the human body with the anime style.
- Official Site (under construction)
- Blade and Soul official site (Korean)
- An interview with Kim Hyung-Tae
- Apple Comics (Korean art book website where a few of Kim Hyung-Tae’s books can be found)
- You can also find many of Kim Hyung-Tae’s art books at Amazon.com
- Original Anime Clay Post
Hiroyuki Takahashi (タカハシヒロユキ) is an absolute genius with no concern for limits. He has clearly established his aesthetic of over-the-top, playful, colorful, Japanese techonophilia, applying it throughout his images, on the character, for the character, and around the character. His compositions, although cluttered with aesthetic props and objects, are masterfully composed, making dynamic use of the simple/blank spaces within the chaos of each subject.
Other than his overall aesthetic, I deeply admire Takahashi for his use of patterns and vectors. I immediately noticed that he used a lot of patterns, but it took me some time to realize how much a part of his art they are. He has a set vocabulary of patterns (like with his object vocabulary) which he employs throughout all of his art, but where he applies them and how they work in each picture really varies. There are a few that seem to be his favorites, and they are as much a part of his art, to me, as his characters are. On the other hand, his vector lines and coloring/shading are handled with mechanical precision and mathematical perfection, making his aesthetic possible while multiplying its effect.
Outside of the aspect of Takahashi’s art and life shown here, there seems to be much more. From what I have seen of his personal taste for fashion and his live art performances, I have come to respect and admire Takahashi as an artist and a person.
I have very high hopes for Hiroyuki Takahashi, and hope he goes very far with his art. In many ways he reminds me of Takashi Murakami, and I could see him leaving a similar impact on the world as a Japanese artist.
Intense, dark, and mechanical. The art of asgr (or あさぎり) simultaneously horrifies as it intrigues, dipping cute anime characters into a nightmare world of machines. If anime were to meet with the machine world of the Matrix as a horror video game, asgr would be the artist to execute it.
asgr’s Pixiv can be found here: http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=24858
