As I’ve approved figures over and over again, I’ve started to think about how they are actually being created.

In manga drawings, there is some sleight of hand in the product, for example most of the time, there are inconsistencies between the frontal view of a face, and a side view of it.

To take manga characters and bring them into the physical world is extremely difficult work, as you not only have to handle those inconsistencies so that you can clear the hurdle of having the figure look like the character whether it is viewed from the front or from the side, but on top of that you have to create it in 3D.

There’s also trickery in how shadows are applied in manga drawings.

In order to keep the feel of the character when dealing with shadows, sometimes they are added when they really shouldn’t be there, and sometimes the are not there when they should be.

That’s probably why, depending on the light that is cast upon them, figures sometimes don’t look like the characters when pictures are taken.

In addition, the drawing style changes during an ongoing manga. No matter what period a drawing is taken from, there will be some difference with how the readers picture the character. The beginning, 1 year in, 5 years in.

Even after that hurdle is crossed and a model is created, there is still the hurdle of color selection that needs to be cleared. Is the hair jet black, or does it have some brown in it? What is the skin tone? Just a 1 mm difference in the lines of the eyes, eyebrows and mouths, can turn everything unsatisfactory.

And even if all that is cleared, there will still be some number of readers for whom there is a difference with how they imagine the character. It’s almost impossible to satisify everyone, and there will probably be people thinking that this it right, etc.

As such, I have a ton of respect for the talented sculptors.