Been thinking for a bit. Based on the fact that this artist also uses the distinctive pouty face in panel 1 and also does Holo content quite often, could they possibly be the one drawing for the Mochimiko channels on youtube?
Been thinking for a bit. Based on the fact that this artist also uses the distinctive pouty face in panel 1 and also does Holo content quite often, could they possibly be the one drawing for the Mochimiko channels on youtube?
I think mochimiko does their own work. There's distinct differences in the way they color but it's not totally uncommon for artist to use different pin names for different styles. Could very well be one and the same.
The difference in coloring/shading could be explained by the fact that these aren't animated - even a simple animation requires so many frames to be drawn that going all-out on shading is impractical - unless you're okay with taking 6+ months to complete a 2 minute animation, you're going to have to cut corners and prioritize speed over detail. A 2-3 panel comic page, on the other hand, only requires 2-3 images, so you can have much greater "graphical fidelity" while still keeping a timely update schedule.
That chubby-cheeked pouting face is incredibly distinctive, and I have a hard time believing that it was invented two times independently. If they aren't the same artist, then one of them is clearly basing their art style on the other's work, or perhaps more likely, both are basing their style on some third party's work that we aren't aware of. My gut tells me that their art might be based on a cartoon for very small children - those types of shows are less likely to be recognized overseas than shows targeted at older audiences, and often look very different from said shows for older audiences (just look at Doraemon and Anpanman, the two most successful Japanese cartoons of all time, and contrast them with what we overseas consider "anime" as looking like), so it makes a good candidate for something that 1) looks very distinctive compared to what we would consider "anime style" and 2) would be recognizable enough in Japan that it wouldn't be hard to believe that two different artists might independently base their own art style off of it, but 3) would fly under the radar of western audiences such that they would miss the reference and fail to make the connection.
Yeah. Most of the style aspects could have come from any number of moeblob series but then we have the very specific form of :> which has very few examples even among doujins, but is a staple for both Mochimiko and Mau that their respective audiences expect to see in every piece.
I think Hanamaru, Potemayo and Puchimas (and Yuureidoushi by extension) used this face very occasionally but outside of that the closest style I can match it to is Shin Chan which is otherwise far removed from this brand of moe. I think Moyazou has used it in specific contexts but their overall style is completely different.
Either Mau and Mochimiko are the same person or one was directly inspired by the other. This is all not meant as a forbidden knowledge type thing, by the way, it's just an intriguing strong coincidence.
I think Hanamaru, Potemayo and Puchimas (and Yuureidoushi by extension) used this face very occasionally but outside of that the closest style I can match it to is Shin Chan which is otherwise far removed from this brand of moe. I think Moyazou has used it in specific contexts but their overall style is completely different.
If other artists are using this face at all, even (or maybe even especially) if they're only using it occasionally, I think that only strengthens the chances that this is a reference to some other work's art style. Do you have any links to posts of those other artists using this face?
Unless you yourself grew up in Japan at around the same time as these artists would have been growing up, not being able to recall or easily find the work that might have inspired this style isn't a dealbreaker - we're in all likelihood looking for a show that was targeted towards elementary school or pre-school kids, and may have only aired for a decade or less, over a decade in the past. Such a show may not have any information on it written in English at all - how much literature would you expect to see written in Japanese about The Backyardigans or Little Einsteins? - but would have been able to leave an impression on any number of Japanese artists in the right age bracket, who would have watched the show when they were kids.
