#the strange similar but very humanoid designs were cute but i wanted to try to push for more.. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

synthaphone · 8 years ago

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So my friend posted an influence board today and I realized that I haven’t made one of these since I was in high school, so I decided to make a new one for myself!

i talk forever under the cut

1. Lilo and Stitch- I love the character designs and backgrounds from this movie especially, and it was one of the first movies that I decided I wanted to go to the movies to see as a kid. I was obsessed with the characters for a really long time and loved the animated series a ton, so its definitely left an impact on me and is still probably my favorite Disney movie today (not including PIXAR movies)

2. Doug TenNapel - I no longer actively seek out this dudes work because he’s got some shit-ass opinions and I don’t like him, but his art style is really distinctive and has definitely influenced my work. The way he handled his brushwork in GEAR and the atmosphere and feel of The Neverhood are what stick out to me as favorites, as well as some of his character designs- I actively admired the way he draws legs and bug people in particular and tried to mimic those elements in my art while in high school.

3. J. Otto Seibold - I love Seibold’s approach to character design, composition, and the general aesthetic of his work. I don’t think his style carried into my work as much as I wanted it to, but he still stands out in my mind as one of the artists that inspired me most in high school.

4. Samurai Jack - I’ve only watched 7 episodes of this show, but the way it handles backgrounds and action scenes is absolutely fantastic. I usually don’t enjoy fight scenes, even ones that I know are supposed to be well choreographed, but I can watch that first big fight with the dogs and Jack vs. the robot bugs 40 billion times, and most of the other fights I can remember feel that way to me as well.

5. Neopets - For a long time as a kid, my highest aspirations were to work for Neopets and to learn how to draw as well as their site art, which I thought was the best artwork I had ever seen. Nowadays, I’m actually more often inspired by the older, more gradient-y artwork, because it’s really specifically strange and distinct looking.

6. Beanie Babies - I loved them as a kid and they heavily influenced the way I draw stuffed toys. I remember a lot of the places where they put the seams, and I feel like it led to me having a better understanding of construction somehow.

7. Tomokazu Komiya (and Pokemon in general) - Pokemon is a HUGE inspiration for the way I approach creature design and for the world the games take place in, but more recently I’ve been specifically fond of Tomokazu Komiya’s Pokemon card illustrations. They’re very dynamic and extremely stylized, and I just really love his approach to all of the Pokemon he illustrates.

8. Rodney Alan Greenblat - His art is so colorful and whimsical and I really love his sense of character design as well

9. Calico Critters/Sylvanian Families - I avidly collected these for years, and they kind of stand out to me as a sort of weird outlier among my interests? I tend to really love sci fi, bright colors, and fantastical things, and these dolls are really subdued and old fashioned by comparison. Something about how soft and mundane they are really speaks to me though, haha.

10. Spyro the Dragon - I would play this at my cousins house when I was 4, and I was terrible at it but I LOVED it. I discovered how much I loved dragons through it and it firmly cemented things like ‘gems’ and ‘orbs’ as magical, valuable objects for years. I still really love the style, music, environments, and sound effects, as well as how cute the model for Spyro is in the game. I only really remember the first game extensively though, since that’s the one I’ve replayed some of recently.

11. Steven Universe - LOVE the backgrounds and color schemes of this show, and the simple way they approach drawing people and humanoid characters was such a good influence for me. I tend to avoid drawing human characters, and this style is a way better stepping stone to figuring out a unique style than Invader Zim was (god that style held back the way I drew human beings for years, because they were SO stylized)

12. Homestar Runner - I loved the bright colors and weird, imperfect flatness of these characters, and it definitely pushed me into stranger character designs and also influenced my sense of humor quite a bit.

13. Kirby Superstar Ultra - The first Kirby game I ever played, and the one that stands out to me as ‘Kirby’ in my mind. The abstracted nature of the backgrounds and environments is really beautiful to me, and I would love to be able to incorporate more strangeness like that in places I design.

14. The Aquabats! - Their promotional material and aesthetic is so colorful and bright and kind of has a weird subtle edge to a lot of it that definitely influenced my artwork. They were the first really unapologetically goofy thing that I ever let myself enjoy un-ironically, which still means a lot to me today. I particularly love the album cover for VS The Floating Eye of Death and used to draw a lot of pictures based off of it.

15. Poo-Chi (and other robotic/handheld electronic pets) - Still a huge reason why toy design is so interesting to me; I loved these as a kid and they still have a weird grip on me that I can’t quite explain? I never had much fun playing with the robotic pets with the batteries in as a kid, I’d use them more as cool giant action figures. Robo-Chi toys basically embodied the way I wanted robots to look, especially those weird semi-translucent colored orbs on their joints.

16. Invader Zim - Invader Zim consumed my life for my first year of high school, and radically altered the way I drew everything- however, as embarrassing as it is for me to look back on, and as much as it pushed my artwork back in some ways, Invader Zim is what inspired me to make a DeviantArt account online and start making art super frequently. I got worse before I got better, but I also believe that trying to figure out how to draw the characters accurately gave me a better understanding of construction and using angular shapes than I would have had without it (not that I figured that stuff out while I was obsessed with Zim, but it left me with a ton of oddly-proportioned original character designs that I was forced to learn how to draw better later on)

17. early Fleischer Brothers cartoons - I don’t actually enjoy these as much as I enjoy the general animation style of them. The fluidity and absurdism makes them feel really eerie and unsettling, but they also have a cutesy-ness to them that was sort of the style of the time period, and I really enjoy it. I particularly love the nightmare hell labyrinth depicted in Bimbo’s Initiation.

18. Splatoon - This game is an aesthetic dream to me. I love all of the colors, the character design, how fluid it feels to play, and I ESPECIALLY love the fashion- this was the first game I’ve played where almost all of the clothes are things that I think look super cool and want to wear in real life.

honorable mention that didn’t fit on this image:

19. The Akiko book series by Mark Crilley - The way that Crilley depicts space is, along with Neopets, my primary fantasy space world inspiration. It's like a really cool road trip through absurd and interesting places. It feels similar to the way that Futurama, Star Wars, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy depict space as a huge living space with aliens constantly traveling between worlds, but without the sort of cynical and threatening tone that those depictions tend to have. Crilley’s Billy Clikk books were also really cool to me- the idea of a secret team of monster wranglers who have flying vans and underwater headquarters was so cool to me, and I remember rereading the part where the main character discovers his parents’ secret lives and gets to see the headquarters for the first time over and over.

#personal #i should be working i need to start working

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heromngmnt · 6 years ago

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You may know that Funko had their ups and downs throughout their most popular line production. Their figurines weren’t always amazing or cute. It was a time when most of the figurines looked quite the same which wasn’t much fitting for most of them. It has changed when the production moved to Vietnam and the quality went up but there still are some pearls which are simply ugly. I want to invite you to my personal list of the ugliest Funko Pop!s I could find. It’s not the definitive list and I don’t expect everyone to agree with it. As the first part of this series, I present you the characters out of imagination. Cartoons, animations, comics and games, all of those that don’t belong anywhere else. Enjoy!

Sidenote: I am aware some of them are terribly pricey and rare. It does not change their appearance. I still don’t understand why people want them, but well, I don’t have to. 😉

1. Beavis and Butthead – the personal favourite

These are not like the other Pops! They are my personal top of the worst ever Funko Pop!s. Sure, it was definitely tricky to make something out of the cartoon but then these are far from their original appearances.