If anyone is wondering: yes, people use real photos as a reference for their background art. In anime/ manga, they’ll often trace and then use watercolor/ digital art/ ink.
Berserk has a whole host of real-world inspirations that are really neat. Here’s an example:
Some of the lower budget studios will just straight up Rotoscope an image and then draw their characters in afterwards. Food is the biggest offender. Which is fair for producing an artwork of quality with limited resources, I suppose.
The thing about food looking hyper-realistic is an artifact of a studio that got ridiculed for animating it particularly badly. Ever since then, it has been a meme to make food overly detailed.
If anyone is wondering: yes, people use real photos as a reference for their background art. In anime/ manga, they’ll often trace and then use watercolor/ digital art/ ink.
Berserk has a whole host of real-world inspirations that are really neat. Here’s an example:
One Punch Man has a lot of IRL tracing aswell.
Some of the lower budget studios will just straight up Rotoscope an image and then draw their characters in afterwards. Food is the biggest offender. Which is fair for producing an artwork of quality with limited resources, I suppose.
The thing about food looking hyper-realistic is an artifact of a studio that got ridiculed for animating it particularly badly. Ever since then, it has been a meme to make food overly detailed.
Often not traced, just reproduced.