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Dessert, not defecation.

Until I was in the fourth grade, I had no idea that Japanese illustrated poo was different from American illustrated poo. Then I went over to the house of a friend who was really into imported video games and played Kato-chan and Ken-chan for the PC-Engine, which featured enemies that attacked you with the same tightly coiled cone of dark brown excrement that has since gone on to world fame as the poo emoji.

Having a standard, stylized, and now internationally accepted way of drawing poo is pretty handy for artists, since it lets them draw something that, due to differences in diet and digestion, may not really have a consistent shape from person to person (or even meal to meal). But on the downside, the illustrated poo pioneered by Japan looks a lot like a swirl of soft serve ice cream. The similarity is so pronounced that if you’re not careful when drawing manga or other illustrations, your charming scene of characters snacking on ice cream cones can end up looking like they’re all happily licking turds.

So how can you keep your illustrated ice cream from looking like drawn droppings? Japanese Twitter user @ranocchio666_of has some pointers.

The first thing to be careful of are the proportions. While both an ice cream cone and pile of poop are vaguely trapezoidal in shape, the ice cream should be considerably taller than it is wide, since being frozen gives it more structural integrity than a poo coil, which will be wider by comparison.

Next, you’ll want to make sure the ice cream has a larger number of coils, since, in performing their duties, the server’s hand is likely to be doing more swirling than the human colon. And third, to further differentiate the ice cream, @ranocchio666_of recommends making the swirls diagonal, as opposed to the horizontal lines of the standardized poo illustration.

As a bonus tip, @ranocchio666_of says you should keep in mind that many soft serve machines spit the ice cream out with a star-shaped cross section. Adding a tear drop pattern to the ice cream’s swirls should produce the same visual effect in your artwork.

Now, armed with this information, you should be all set to let your illustrated characters enjoy ice cream, even if it’s chocolate.

Source: IT Media
Top image ©RocketNews24

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s just now wondering why the birds in Kato-chan and Ken-chan had brown poop instead of white.