Creating a Sailor Moon style cartoon with Anime Studio Pro?

[Rudiger]

One of the most distinctive things about Japanese anime is the extraordinary detail put into the eyes. Getting that look is not easy as it requires multiple colour separations within the iris area - programs such as Animo were better for this than AS as it has very good colour blending tools.

However last week, I dawned on me that trying to make the iris in AS is not the simplest approach.

Making the iris in Photoshop is both better and easier. If that is then saved out as a bitmap and bought into AS as a fill image texture, the resulting look is the same. In my tests, I left the pupil as a vectored layer (so it's size is can change), as was the highlights as they need to move according to where the eye is looking). The eyebrow shadow over the eyeball was also vectored, with a 40% alpha and plenty of blur. The result looked really good.

This technique is good not only for anime but eyes in other genres too.

Might make this into tutorial and post to Techniques if there is a demand for it.


Rhoel


This might be reinventing the wheel but what the hell: I don't remember anyone else talking about it.

The great thing about tutorials is that you don't know who it will inspire and how it will inspire them. You should definitely post a more detailed description of this in the techniques section. I'm still not completely sure I understand it; are you talking about having a base bitmap for the eye done in Photoshop, with shadows and highlights done with AS. I agree that it's important to use vectors for the eyes, otherwise you can end up with dead-eye syndrome, which is definitely not what Anime (or any good animation) is about.

[CoffeeStained]

Although, strictly speaking, The Last Airbender isn't anime (because it isn't produced in Japan)

Strictly speaking, a ton of anime is not anime then, since Japanese properties are regularly outsourced to Korean animation studios.

What? Does that mean expressionism is only authentic if done by French painters?

It's funny that you drew a similarity to French impressionism. Anime is a Japanese word borrowed from the French word for animation, that word being 'anime'. The word fits in nicely with the Japanese phonic alphabet and their obsession with shortening words if at all possible.