How to become a Successful Anime-style Artist

Practical info

Author: Yoai
Genres: Non-fiction
Sub-genres: Art
Publication year: 2022
Edition: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-912843-49-7
Blurb: Take the leap and turn your passion for creating anime-inspired art into a successful career with this guide to drawing and painting, promoting, and selling your work. How can you develop an individual style? What is your brand? Who is your audience and how will you engage with them? You will find the answers in this book, as leading artists share how they planned, built, and now manage their own anime-style art careers.

Personal info

Why I picked it up: I was scrolling through 3Dtotal's (the publisher's) website and saw this one, and at the time, I was struggling with what I wanted to do with my art career and had no idea how to make it work. Then I got a few of 3Dtotal's books for Christmas after I gave a list of which I would want, and this was one of the ones I got.
Status: Finished
Progress: 274/274 pages
Started: 26-12-2024
Finished: 18-12-2025
Rating: 3/5 stars
Reread count: 0
Overall opinion: It’s not amazing. But the fact that it took me nearly a year to finish has to do with other things. The book itself is fine, there’s not really anything revolutionary about it or anything. I skipped all the tutorials because they’re too basic for me. And the case studies of the careers all feel kinda the same, with slight differences in specialisation. It’s basically all “I grew my audience online back when it was easy and things grew from there.” All around the same time period too.
The title focuses on anime-style artists, and the first part of the book that goes in-depth about what anime art is covers different ways of working and jobs in the industry, but the artists they interviewed are all social media artists, and a couple are very loosely anime. The advice they give could work for any stylised artist who likes character art, like mine. I wouldn’t call my art anime-style (I think) but the advice is generic enough that that doesn’t matter. Because it being anime is not at all the reason they’re successful.
So, I read it. It was cool to look at the art and see the pages with their artistic timelines. But did I learn anything from it? Meh.