>>2378
>My thanks to the current BO for doing such a good job carrying on my intentions. I don't know if he still actively monitors threads here, but if he does: you're doing a good job, and you are a good fit for this board. God loves you.
Oh shoot, you're still around. I wasted so much time overthinking what to say to
>>2379 that I completely missed that.
Thanks. That does mean a lot, even though I know I haven't really brought the place's potential out yet and that it's incredibly slow as far as boards go. I do check this place pretty regularly, but I usually don't post with my moderator tag on because I prefer just posting as an anon.
Part of why I either want to pass the board on someday or at least have an active vol or two alongside me (the latter is likely more realistic for now, and would make passing the mantle on someday go more smoothly) is because there's a good chance I'll stay at a monastery for a couple days maybe once a year or so, and I really, really do not relish the idea of having to check /kemono/ while hanging out with monks. It's nothing against you guys: that just isn't the place for it.
>>2379
I'll try to get back to you on some of this later. What I'll say for now is this:
Don't let people tell you that drawing women with decently-sized boobs or hips (or large ones, for that matter) is "porn-brained," "coomershit," or whatever other buzzwords retards throw at you. Something I've had the misfortune of learning over the last couple years is that a lot of the people who are loudest about this are not speaking from a place of virtue, but are often fags or trannies who see this stuff as a way of taking it out on non-gays and femininity. Pretending that women who aren't flat and hipless don't exist outside pornography is not only a denial of reality and the feminine, but is itself a mindset which pushes everything outside it towards smut.
Now, before I go to sleep, here be dragons:
https://orthodoxartsjournal.org/sacred-art-and-the-power-of-women/ has some thoughts worth pondering in the meantime. It isn't something you should directly replicate, as you aren't making sacred art, but anime art has an inherent platonism and iconic quality to it which comes out quite strongly when you see waifufags try to articulate 2D vs 3D and end up describing Plato's theory of forms or reverse-engineering old theological or mystical concepts by accident.
If bringing up platonism sounds inappropriately western here, you have to remember that anime art isn't purely Japanese in its origin, but is a very Japanese encounter of eastern and western art. The traits in anime art which western artists identify in their complaints as "symbol drawing" aren't actually flaws for the most part, but on the contrary are an extremely impressive and sophisticated marriage of qualities found in more iconic art with western techniques that have a long history of smothering or destroying them by accident. These qualities were formerly more common in various western and near eastern art traditions, but were often lost through the transition into Renaissance art (IIRC Plato had similar complaints about the Greek statuary which this later transformation drew from), and the various modernist attempts at recovering said qualities fell apart into art so idiosyncratic it became like the artist's private language or art so high that it lost its connection with the earth, both of which often became inscrutable and meaningless to most. That the Japanese pulled this off so well is, to repeat myself, extremely impressive, and our own confused relationship with it makes a little more sense when you realise we're partially encountering something from our own past which we fell away from and don't really get anymore.
Please excuse me if the spergetry in the last paragraph isn't entirely clear and certain words like "iconic" strike you as a bit too vague. If it isn't obvious, it isn't something I completely get yet, and it'll likely take more studies in art history and religious iconography, artfagging, and weird observations to tease out over time. I'll tie this into something a little more relevant to your post when I'm more awake.