In this first of a quasi-regular series I hope to shed some light on problems common to anime fan art. This is not a perfect guide nor am I a perfect artist. I am in no way saying that I am a better artist than the creators of these works but only that I have some comments which may be useful to doing better art in the future. I'm not going to go into great diatribes on artistic technique here and most of the work I will do will be line drawings and computer art. I am not concerned with making complete, final images but rather studies that someone could work from to create a final image.
Needless to say these articles will be very graphics intensive so load times will be in minutes. I apologize for this and I am optimizing the graphics as much as possible.

Mylene

The image here was provided by Terrance Bosch of Imperix Studios. Terrance is a self-described former classic artist turned amateur director who's art prowess has been destroyed due to years of drawing art content.
The character is Mylene from MACROSS 7 doing her idol thing on stage.
Since the image was almost completely computer generated (he sketched it in with a mouse) I went ahead and used my computers to do the modifications rather than go back and start from the pencil stage, which would have been a better choice. It was my desire to match the media but I found that it took me about 6 times longer to do the modifications than if I had just redrawn, scanned it in and colored it. I always suggest that people start with drawings rather than try to do them in the computer because most everyone is better with a pencil than a graphics tablet.

Impressions

The first thing that I think when I see the image is that the color balance is OK, but the pose is really stiff. Her face is too large and her expression looks to be of shock. (One imagines someone jumping up on the stage and exploding or dropping their pants or some such in the previous scene.) Her hair also seems awfully stiff.
The lens flare is in a spot that makes it look more like the sun than a stage light.

Modifications

I had never drawn Mylene before, in fact I have never seen an episode of MACROSS 7, so I had to dig around for reference material and finally found a couple big (and totally illegal) image galleries on the Web and some advertizements in old anime magazines. (And to think my wife thought I was an idiot for keeping a 7 foot tall stack of mouldering anime magazines which block the bookcases. Well, that showed her!) When I compared the images I noted that her hair was purple where Mylene's is bubblegum pink and her eyes were much smaller than the original character's. Eyes and mouth are too small, hairstyle is different, chest is the wrong shape.
There is nothing wrong with interpreting a character differently than the original animation's settei and, in fact, that is preferable to doing it the same way. If you're just copying the settei then there is no point in doing the art because it won't be your art. So I tried to stay away from worrying about exact details and concentrated on the artwork rather than the design.

Computer (Geek) Stuff

All of the retouching here was done with Adobe Photoshop 5.0, Photoshop 4.0 (Japanese version) and MetaCreations Painter 5.0. 3D was done with MetaCreations Poser 2.0 and MetaCreations Bryce 3D. Images were compressed for Web use with Adobe ImageReady. I used a homebuilt dual processor 200MHz Pentium Pro (128MB RAM, 9GB hard drive) running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and a Dell Workstation 400 dual processor 333MHz Pentium II (64MB RAM, 18GB hard drive space) running Japanese Windows NT 4.0 Server, both hooked into the same keyboard, mouse and 21" monitor through a switchbox. For the drawing I used a Wacom ArtZ II 12x12 graphics tablet.