Line art?

Topics not covered in other forums. NO POLITICS OR RELIGION.
Post Reply
Mafty
Posts: 1131
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:43 am

Line art?

So where exactly does line art for mecha shows come from anyway? Is it taken from model kits, the shows website or books/magazines? Or is it drawn by members of the fandom? Or does it vary depending on the situation? It's harder to find mech line art online from really obscure shows (Jinki Extend, Argento Soma, Buddy Complex, Orguss 2, etc) so some might be tied to official sources.
User avatar
MythSearcher
Posts: 1845
Joined: Sun Jan 20, 2013 4:36 pm

Re: Line art?

Mafty wrote: Mon Jun 21, 2021 12:39 am So where exactly does line art for mecha shows come from anyway? Is it taken from model kits, the shows website or books/magazines? Or is it drawn by members of the fandom? Or does it vary depending on the situation? It's harder to find mech line art online from really obscure shows (Jinki Extend, Argento Soma, Buddy Complex, Orguss 2, etc) so some might be tied to official sources.
Japanese sources often include line art, I don't find them particularly hard to find.
They just love to publish the line art in the setting books, so unless you get a really unpopular show where they think it is impossible to rake in some more money from publishing the books, you can almost always get the line art.
User avatar
Seto Kaiba
Posts: 2230
Joined: Mon Feb 06, 2012 7:18 pm
Contact:

Re: Line art?

Mafty wrote: Mon Jun 21, 2021 12:39 am So where exactly does line art for mecha shows come from anyway? Is it taken from model kits, the shows website or books/magazines? Or is it drawn by members of the fandom? Or does it vary depending on the situation? It's harder to find mech line art online from really obscure shows (Jinki Extend, Argento Soma, Buddy Complex, Orguss 2, etc) so some might be tied to official sources.
Line art is typically production reference material meant to instruct the animators working on the series on drawing the designs used in the show. Merchandising is very important to anime in order to quickly recoup the development and production costs, and one perennially popular way to get a jump start on doing that is to publish a collection of that pre-existing production reference material as an artbook.

That's where the vast majority of the line art you see online comes from.

Some comes from hobby magazines and other periodicals that publish some line art as part of articles covering new (or old) anime, though that selection is usually much smaller than what ends up in the artbooks.

Barring cases like Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross that bombed so hard that their licensees abandoned merchandising efforts, the reason it's harder to find line art from obscure shows is simply that they're obscure shows for which nobody's bothered to scan or widely disseminate artbooks.
The Macross Mecha Manual
Yes, we're working on updates...
Post Reply