>>287767>"If you think of referencing as tracing, ... you'll avoid tracing out of a sense of righteousness..."To draw something from memory and have it coincide with another work does not destroy a sense of righteousness, this naturally occurs in creative environments.
>"... you'll only reference to the extent that you recreate someone else's material perfectly."Being influenced by another artist occurs, generally leading to camparisons of style, but style is usually defined by the outcome, even though many artists follow the standard 'sketch, clean, ink, color' method of producing the end result. To say that a person is exactly influenced by only one style--so much so that the end result mirrors the reference material--is more than difficult to prove, unless said artist has been immersed in nothing but that particular persuasion(this occurred once when i wrote a story after playing Max Payne 2 in one sitting: the story reminded someone else of that game precisely, even though they shared very few common materials.)
>>287803>"as a professional character designer I have to say referance is very important..."Then you can concede that references do not have to be popular anime or manga; references can be photos, prop materials, or models, for example. To say that a person can only reference animated or drawn styles is to refute my assertion of concession.
>>287819>There is a lot of style emulation in the anime world.While common features(Big Eyes, Small Mouth[BESM] and geometric hair) are commonplace in anime, this does not preclude an artist from being original. On the contrary, the numerous interpretations and variations of many common elements lead to a unique art style, such as One Piece characters not having elbows, or Ichigo Mashimaro characters have egregiously large heads. To make one set of elements--your set of elements--unique, that constitutes art.
