While this article is mainly directed at beginning artists interested in anime/manga or stylized cartoons, this is relevant to every artist regardless of his or her skills or particular interests. What will be explained is a fundamental concept that lies beneath the success of an artist in any field of art.

If you are truly serious about your artistic improvement, it is necessary for you to stop placing your "style" in such a high regard. You can return to anime or whatever other stylized work you aspire to once you've learned the basics, but until you have a firm grasp of anatomy, perspective, light, color theory, composition, etc., you are not ready to stylize in any capacity. Learning how to draw well is difficult, and you can't cut corners just because you don't want to spend time learning the boring things. Very few people actually want to spend their whole lives drawing perfectly naturalistic artwork, but in order to really understand your work, you need to know how. Simplifying forms, in a way, is much, much harder than drawing things as they actually are; even when a detail is absent in a final piece, for it to be aesthetically successful, the artist has to work with conscious regard to the details he is purposefully omitting in his process.

Realism is not a style, but a foundation upon which all other art forms are based. Every truly successful artist learned to draw from life before he stylized his artwork. Even abstraction is grounded in life (albeit further removed than some other forms); an abstract artist still needs to know how to use symbols to connote feelings and represent complex forms. He has to know what a real person looks like to be able to create a symbol which registers as "human" to the viewer. He has to know how colors and shapes and their arrangement subtly affect the human mind in order to invoke the desired emotion within the painting. Anime/manga artists are not exempt from these concepts.

A realistic painter, an abstract artist and a mangaka all draw the same thing: the human form. Each artist does so in a different manner, but fundamentally, they are representing the same exact thing. Each of these artists learn, or at least should learn, how to draw the human form in the same way -- they start with what they see, and only after that has been mastered do they move onto exaggerating and altering the anatomy and form in favor of something more aesthetically pleasing or appropriate for the piece's mood and context. You cannot start drawing your subjects with stylistic liberties, or your learnings are fundamentally flawed from the beginning; instead of consciously stylizing your art in a way to make it more appealing, you end up languishing in ignorance, further and further distorting the form until it's so far gone it's not even recognizably human -- you're stylizing something that is already a stylization. It just doesn't work. You have to have that foundation, something you can return to in order to understand what makes something real and what makes something not look real, or you will be completely blind to your errors.

Tracing the footsteps of an artist you admire is always more productive than blindly copying his final works. And I will reiterate, yet again, what exactly every successful artist in history has done: he learned from life. He drew what he saw, he studied anatomy, he carefully watched how light behaved, and he supplemented his observations with textbook knowledge that was not drawn by 13 year old girls on DeviantART. Yes, even anime/manga artists. Amuria and Ramy are not people you should aspire to.

To the right is a painting by Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous abstract artists of all time. Even he knew how to make a realistic painting; it was his solid foundation in the basics of art that made his subsequent foray into the abstract arts so successful.