#the strange similar but very humanoid designs were cute but i wanted to try to push for more..

[scorchrend]

do you all remember etre and xioct? yeah? my deltarune ocs? yeah they’re being ported to undertale. also their concepts changed. orchid mantis and blue monkshood yippeee

[tumblunni]

More progress on unnamed monster petshop game idea! Woo! Very long post and some drawings below!

* OKAY! NAME IDEAS! Monster Meadow? Monster Market? Beast Boutique? or is alliteration too lame and cheesy? how about FIEND ORCHARD that just sounds catchy even though you arent actually growing pets on trees, i just started off looking for rhyming synonyms for farm and somehow got carried away

* WAIT NO WHAT IF YOU GROW PETS ON TREES i mean, how you get the monsters isnt really a big detail after all. I was just gonna assume they breed normally like pokemon. But this game idea is vaguely inspired by monster rancher, and in that one monsters were summoned from magical tablets that get dug up like fossils. So hey! why NOT have pet trees! or at least something similar that would kinda justify the title THEN AGAIN, I mean, final fantasy doesnt have a reason to be called final fantasy, lol

* We’ve got some other names down, too! I still dont have a design for the protagonist, but they’re gonna be called Lieven. (Or possibly Lieve, which is the gender neutral equivelant) Its a german name that means ‘beloved friend’, so I think it’d fit well with our big ol hug-in-a-mug protag! And then the assistant girl is gonna be called Justine, or Justy for short. I think it fits her cos its a kinda badass superhero sidekick name, and then the full name is a rather fancy and serious one. Fits with her being lil miss grumpypants, and also the true brains behind the operation!

* We also have more of a concrete idea for the gameplay! It might work better if its not totally the same premise as monster rancher, where your only goal with breeding these pets is to make one strong enough to win a bunch of tournements. The new idea is... instead of just a farm, a pet store! Selling your monsters is more of a big thing in this game. It would give a lot more reason to raise monsters of different types, instead of just going for the highest stats. We’re thinking having multiple ‘job classes’ of customer, similar to how it works in Recettear. So, for example, a family with a young child might be looking for a monster that isnt very strong but has high obedience and a friendly personality. And you could actually lose reputation by selling them a high stats monster, cos they decide it’s too dangerous for their child and want a refund. And you might find people wanting a monster to help out in different jobs that require different stats, or a foppish rich twat who just wants something rare and doesnt care about stats at all. And people requesting specific sub-breeds of monster fusion, to give you an incentive to fill up the full list of them! (Also possibly rewards from Justy for when you hit certain total amounts of monsters?) Oh, and maybe there’d also be an aspect of having to judge whether your monsters would actually be happy at their new home. Sometimes refusing a customer is the right choice! Or you can disregard morality and sell them to the shady guy offering a higher price, who’ll probably sell them on to a butcher... But also you can keep some of your raised monsters for yourself! Its just hard to raise a really big farm without making some income to support it. We’re thinking maybe a party of max three monsters in battle would be a good balanced number.

* We also now have a rather in-depth backstory for Justy, thanks to @summon-daze! Her basic story concept is that monster raising is a sport only for the wealthy, and she’s a kid from a poor family who’s working as assistant to these wealthy toffs in order to work her way up the ladder and get her own monster career someday. But Daze gave me some more ideas of her grandma being like her secret mentor from beyond the grave! Justy always loved monsters and wanted to own one someday, but the big moment that made her determined to tear the world apart to achieve that dream was the day her grandma died. She had to see the debt collectors taking her grandma’s house, cos the family couldnt afford to keep it. And while she was desperately trying to steal as much as she could carry so she’d at least have some memories left, she stumbled upon her grandma’s secret collection of monster raising books. The thought that her grandma had also lived and died without ever being able to achieve her dreams was painful enough to fill her with righteous fury! So, now she has her grandma’s homemade diary of monster raising tips, and she’ll be able to add her own experiences to it as you play through the game. An actual incentive to get 100% completion, cos it means helping her finally finish a beloved relative’s life’s work! Oh, and I think this could also be an excuse for some extra cuteness in tutorials and stuff. Like, they’re presented in the form of pages from textbooks, with Justy’s grandma’s corrections scribbled in the margin, and lil pictures of her as a young girl used as bookmarks. By the end of the game you might be mourning grandma too! And it’d also be nice to see Justy showing you more of her work as you become closer with her, and you might even end up seeing your protagonist adding comments in the margins too. It’s our family heirloom, and you’re becoming part of the family too! :3

* I’ve already shown my idea for the Dark type ghost bunnies, but my friend @summon-daze helped me think up a cool idea for an npc member of that species! (Also theyre named Geists now) Your assistant Justy would have a big ornery scruffy sabertooth eldeerly geist with a bad temper, who’s like the grumpliest tutorial ever. This was her grandma’s secret beloved monster pet, and it vowed to protect Justy after its owner passed away. So she’s kind to the lil girl but hates everything and everyone else. She’s more of a wild monster that just happens to help out every now and again, so you cant cheat and take her to contests instead of raising your own. But maybe she could be a bonus boss! Also, Justy continues to be The Most Badass Sidekick Ever, cos she can actually carry around this massive hellbeast! I’m imagining poor protagonist being crushed cos it fell asleep on their foot, and then Justy just casually deadlifts it like a marshmallow. And probably also bench presses the sofa on the way out.

* The Light type would be little floating halos with wings. A very nonhumanoid type of angel monster! And I have a bunch of ideas about cool animations for the halos interlocking and rotating like gears! Each monster would be two halos, one with the wings and one with eyes, and then a glowy sphere in the middle thats like their heart. And they could fight by throwing their own independant parts at enemies and grinding them between the gears, and also I think maybe they can open portals in the centre and do some limited teleportation and/or shoot lazers...? MANY IDEAS!

I was also thinking that they can summon a pure light hologram silhouette thing from out of their portals, and they choose to make this spirit look humanoid as a sign of admiration for their owners. The halo form would be their default form tho, the spirit would only pop out during some attack animations and when it’s being cute on the farm. Look, mama! Just like you!

* I’m still working on a kind of ambiguous idea right now. it was originally intended to be a rock type cat, but the crystals looked more like ice and it somehow turned into a grandpa dragon along the way...

* Another idea i had was that the Fire type monster could be a small humanoid fairy with a sword for a tail. Spirits of the forge! They’d have a big lock around their neck and the flavour text would be that they’re primordial flame spirits who were sealed into this cute form by the gods for their mischief. So they’d most commonly have grumpy grandpa type personalities, and be all warriorlike, and get super pissed that everyone just finds it adorable!

And maybe there could be a secret sidequest to unchain them and get a new monster type? But they’re shy about their master maybe not liking them anymore now they’ve stopped being cute. YOU ARE STILL CUTE, LIL BUDDY!!! :( I’m not sure yet what the unsealed super form would be, maybe a more typical super buff lizardman genie thing? or maybe just a completely nonhumanoid dragon of doom

* I’m thinking of a whole bunch of names for them but really I cant decide! First impulse is just to call them Pixies or something, but that makes me think of the weird sexy monsters in Monster Rancher, lol Then I was thinking maybe just name them to reference a fire god- Maybe Vulcanus, Agni or Ogun? i know its kind of a trope in rpgs to have random enemies named after everyone from every mythology, even when its just a random shout out and they dont even look similar. But I don’t know if people from these religions find it insensitive? Then another thought was maybe ‘Maohs’. Like, a comically overblown evil overlord name for these adorable lil things! And maoh just literally is the japanese word for that story archetype, its not any specific mythological character. So it could be a cute reference to real life mythos without turning any actual major deity into a monster design.

* Another idea that summon-daze helped me with was a strange dog thingie that might be either water or grass? The idea is that its just a big goofy nose and tongue attatched to a giant puff of either grass or seaweed. (Depending on what element I decide to go for.) So its ambiguous whether this actually is a dog thats just covered in heavy fur, or if its a sentient hedge that just happens to have a doglike face. Either way, its huggable!

* Also i wanna have a mantis monster of some sort!! or another monster with mantis style arms. Mantises are just unfairly underappreciated cuties!

[synthaphone]

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.

[heromngmnt]

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.

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2. Regular Show

This one is a semi-classic by Cartoon Network and definitely a very strange one. Mordecai and Rigby were always very special in looks and Funko, unfortunately, didn’t give them justice.

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3. Sonic The Hedgehog

Recently Funko decided to make a remake of the series, and I am very glad they did. The ones I’m showing were made in 2013 and their foreheads are huge-hog. Sonic looks like he was very angry with you. And Knuckles… Well, to me he has something from the recent meme.

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4. [Un]lucky there’s Family Guy

Characters from Family Guy have a very special design of a certain shape. As of Brian being more or less in a rectangular one, Funko did quite all right. Sadly, Peter is being more of a circle and Steve – an ellipse, and it is not a pleasant match. Funko tried to make their heads as usual and include their famous features at the same time. The result got quite awkward and so both of them are really untrue to the originals. Steve got his head completely remade and Peter is, well, a very complicated one.

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5. Futurama

Still here? Because it’s a halfway for today. Good. Futurama is already 5 years after its final season but there’re still some fans out there. Sadly, not enough to get the new line. This one is at least disappointing. Fry’s nose is quite awkward in length and Leela is yet another victim of Funko mixing up circle-like features with their edgy trademark.

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  6. Spongebob

Recently Spongebob and Patrick got the new Christmas ones but we’re still missing new Mr Krabs and Squidward. The presented ones are quite pricey and well, I don’t get it. I love this cartoon but I’m not getting these. Ever. Mr Krabs fancy legs looking like bricks and eyes looking like some sort of lightbulbs. Squidward is just… nope. He needs a better head design. And he could be thinner.

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7. Mr Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street

I never actually watched Sesame Street so maybe it’s just me. When I found this Pop I considered it one of the worst I’ve seen but then… I’ve checked how this creature looks like “in reality”. And I believe Funko did a kindness for it.

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8. Toothless – How To Train Your Dragon

I know people who find Toothless cute in this version but I’m crept out by him. The wide spacing between his eyes, very pastel colours and the high forehead design… Come on, there’s nothing Toothless about him. The body may be okay but the more I look at him, the more I feel there’s something wrong with his paws.

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9. PacMan

I still don’t understand why we needed these ones. Ghosts are pretty fine with me, but then Pac Man as a humanoid creature is creepy. If it wasn’t enough, they decided to make a lady to keep him company. And that is just… devastating. I fear what else people will invent.

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10. Killer Croc

Okay, the last on this list. Killer Croc received his film version from Suicide Squad that looks more human-like. This one is based on Batman: Arkham Asylum game and even though Funko did try their best to make it similar to the game prototype… They didn’t quite succeed. Say nothing of the marvellous mouth of teeth, the lazy colouring and even lazier skull design, make this Pop a sad copy.

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BONUS – Domo

Domo used to be what Gudetama is now. He appeared on Japan TV as a short animation between programmes and fast became an icon. There used to be everything with Domo on it. For everyone who doesn’t know about it – Domo also received his own Funko Pop line. The line includes Domo as DC superheroes and characters from Ghostbusters. I’m telling you, you need one in your collection. (No, you don’t).

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EXTRA BONUS – The Sunflower

Have you played in Plants vs Zombies? This may not be a bad Pop, I’m just surprised it actually exists. Anyway, you can have your own Sunflower from the game. If you ever wanted one.

  Thanks for checking out the list, let me know what is your fave from the list and which ones you’d like to see in Google Forms here!

No Pop was hurt while making this list.

The images used were collected from Stashpedia, IMDb and Google Images.

A little out of ordinary, a fun post about one of the most popular collectibles in the world. Welcome to The Ugliest Funko Pop! Volume 1! You may know that Funko had their ups and downs throughout their most popular line production. Their figurines weren't always amazing or cute.