I'm speechless...
Let's get serious.
I have a few questions: Have you noticed that Naoko Takeuchi's newest illustrations are getting worse? They're the ugliest illustrations since the one she made for the Olympics.
No you are right, her art capacity is clearly eroding. The art panels she did for the SM Museum were more polished than this and the worst is that we were already thinking they were clearly worst than the previous new art we had...
Are the illustrations she made in the 90s really made by her or by her assistants? I can't believe that such ugly, poorly composed and designed illustrations, badly drawn, with those ugly colours, were made by the same person who drew the old ones.
It's very possible that her assistants helped her a lot, corrected some of her poses, etc.
Well i think she progressed during her manga publication and general panel composition or anatomy were A BIT better than in the begining, same for her color arts, some pieces were nice in Stars. But it seems she lost most of her progress after the series ended. Her early 2000's style is more childish because it's easier to draw. It was CG but without all poor taste filters and textures that would come later.
And we are now to this horrible era with overused textures and clashing colors, stock pictures from backgrounds, cheap fire or bubbles effect... The olympics one was the absolute worst in my opinion (closely followed by Chibiusa/Hotaru from Chanel).
I don't care what composition illustration is.Its oppion if these are beautiful or not .Not a fact,itspersonaltaste
Would you say the same thing about algebra or geometry ? "I don't care what geometry is, this 3 sides figures is a rectangle, it's my opinion".
Art has laws: composition, colors, anatomy... It's not just a question of taste.
You can surely like it and believe they are pretty, it's totally fine, but Takeuchi has no idea what is anatomy or how to make composition.
No offense to Takeuchi's art which mustn't be criticized at any costs but if she is partnering with a fashion brand and labelling her brand as a luxury high-end fashion product for women, she could start to learn about posing and composition...
At this point, every thing she does is recycle, recycle and recycle... no innovation or originality at all. Guess Tadano is being inspired by the master herself.
Everything is always the same thing - same poses, same expressions... Just like some AI drawings... with the hand and fingers that go with it.
i wonder how that kind of partnership work by the way: who paid who ? Did Chanel paid Takeuchi or was is the opposite ? Maybe it was a fair exchange without any kind of payment but that would be weird.
But yes for such a high end collab, she could have produced more efforts. When you're an artist, you're supposed to always try to improve your art, try new things, learn new technics, you're never really happy with what you do and try to go beyond your limits. Clearly she droped the ball long time ago.
Takeuchi seems to be praised as somehow having ingrained high fashion into her work - which I'm pretty sure if we dig deep enough, most of the 'fashion' illustrations are copied from actual fashion magazines - but she is no where near the level of Araki or Kubo.
https://flic.kr/p/2oBRakg
https://flic.kr/p/2oBRami
Her illustrations have neither a story to tell nor have a mood to transcribe except for Makoto who is either having a headache/is drunk/is doing her re-enactment of a drama queen or all of the above.
These 2 pictures are a very good example of nice fashion sense. Clothes don't seem to have been pasted (as paper dolls) on characters and are prettily drawn. One of Takeuchi's problem is that she is unable to draw some faces angles (like the characters on the left on your second picture, or the third one). So she can't give variety to her poses and her composition because it would mean drawing characters on weird angles and she doesn't even want to try.
If you look at Chibiusa's face on this Chanel art and rotate a little, you will notice her face is absolutely ugly, she tried some "harder" face angle and it's a nightmare...
Sometimes I feel like we're living in the "Emperor's New Clothes" with media and fashion these days and no one says what they actually feel.
These clothes are bordering on hideous, in my opinion.
Yes that doesn't help this set of new arts either. And it doesn't suit her characters at all, it's like she pasted these clothes and her characters without trying to adapt them, change the whole picture colorset so that they don't clash with characters.
