Thankfully, some cartoons like Doug got me on the track of drawing human-type figures, so I progressed from there. Hell, at least that cartoon was creative in it's method of making "multi-colored" and "multi-racial" people without looking like a rainbow glitter fairy threw up on everything. Personally, one of my biggest motivations to learn to draw was attempting to copy a photograph of a major crush of mine. I couldn't just upload his picture from Facebook onto my computer, I had to re-draw it by hand. Other artistic students who managed to make it to realistic portraits/human figures started out with comic books and Anime. Perhaps the lack of easy internet access made us more likely to reach for traditional art manuals and tutorial books, who knows. Perhaps we looked to other types of encouragement outside our own peer group, whereas todays younger people can just to online and wind up in an echo chamber of likes. We also didn't have access to digital art programs-- I imagine the makes people much more lazy than they were back then, when pencil lines had to be erased over and over, colors couldn't be "re-done" with a click of a button.
It seems like for the last few years, there's been this unholy mixture of Anime eyes, Pokemon references, Steven Universe "anatomy", and My Little Pony palettes. The fucking LIPS my god, bizarre proportions, and the stupid cutie-pie faces make me MATI. And what's with these people sperging out with all these multi-racial characters when they keep giving them caucasian blue and green eyes? Giving most of them green and blue eyes-- is that supposed to imply that brown eyes are "inferior"? Isn't that "raaaaacist"?
I think the "agender, non-binary" stuff is lazy, myself. When I first started learning to draw, one of the trickiest things was learning how to "un-learn" my tendency to make things "pretty/feminine" as I was used to drawing anthropomorphic animals and your typical 80s toons. Capturing male features without making them too feminine or too hyper-masculine was a challenge. As a little girl, I didn't want to draw "ugly" things. Kids aren't rewarded or praised by parents or teachers for drawing "gross things". I was about 13 when had to overcome that fear of depicting "ugliness" and things that were "gross" like nostrils, hairy eyebrows, ears. It was also a challenge to depict feminine features in a way that didn't involve big eyelashes and "girl hair". One of my biggest pitfalls was making people look "androgynous" by accident. It was easy to fall into that trap, because sometimes the differences between male and female faces are subtle and require shading, paying close attention to detail. It's like I had to learn how to be "cruel" and depict what I saw, whether it was "pretty" or not.
Some of these artists bypass that whole anatomy-learning stage and just make everyone "feminine", or androgynous, simplistic, and cartoonish. It's lazy in the same way some artists are lazy by over-drawing huge breasts, big eyelashes and big muscles on characters just to "prove" what sex they are.
Why do so many of these characters just stand in awkward poses, saying saying stupid shit? They're not even in actual poses that make sense. Why can't they just make up their own characters? At least one can say the furry artists are capable of some creativity-- and some of them actually attempt to portray anatomy in a way that doesn't make one's eyes bleed. Lately I've seen this trend where characters are depicted squatting-- and instead of that "slav squatting" pose, it looks as if they're taking a dump.
