>>7670129 (OP)
for the most part
there's a really good quote from picasso - “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
a lot of anime and manga artists hone their technical skills early, but anime requires a lot of cheating reality for appeal
many highly skilled anime artists know how to draw realistic faces and bodies, and for the most part, the bodies maintain relatively realistic proportion and figure in anime, but the faces require more abstract approaches and you have to "relearn" the ability to think in symbol and shape to achieve anime style faces, although there's plenty of styles that are more realistic than others
nekojira has like a 2 hour segment in his coloso course where he goes into this exact topic where 90% of his face and head construction is just "lay in a box, divide it in half to mark the start of the upper eyelid, and eyeball the ratio of space between the eyes and the nose to determine the age of the character" and then goes into a lot of how he uses as little shadow shapes on the face as possible to have the face and especially the eyes be the focus, as well as the different techniques he applies to to get different qualities that are otherwise different from drawing more realistic faces. perspective and form also dictate his choices, but he isn't beholden to them and will redraw awkward things that translate poorly into his style until they look good to him, even if it sacrifices some realism
tldr: you still have to know how to draw people and boxes, but kawaii is a state of mind
