art influences/inspirations thread

[emanhattan]

I think my current art style is kind of a weird mesh of elements from each of these artists and their characters:
Tim schafer (psychonauts because of the character designs)
tex avery (wolf because of the animation and besides its tex avery!)
mike judge (beavis n butthead... people tell me my stuff reminds me of it!)
eddie fitzgerald(because of worm paranoia)
and jhonen vazquez(because I own the first season of zim and If i could purchase the second one I would besudes my early drawings attempted to copy him in a way)

im just not oroginal man!

[texas]

tim burton has inspired my art because he made me want to draw things that are macabre and dark but still retain a bit of innocence. most of the things i draw seem kind of sad and lost as opposed to angry or evil.
silent hill influenced me with its twisted monster designs, with creatures that genuinely look like they are suffering. its not what started my monster drawing hobby, but it inspired me to make more asymmetrical, deformed things
i guess courage the cowardly dog was what might have had made me start drawing monsters, though i didnt consciously go, 'hey, i should draw monsters like they have in courage the cowardly dog'. it was just the main source of monsters in my childhood
i dont feel like explaining the rest i am sorry for letting you all down i know how important my inspirations are to all of you $10,000 scholarship etc

[RobHalford]

d

[trent bortknob]

art -
richard williams
preston blair
rtil

music -
omar rodriguez-lopez
matt bellamy
jerry cantrell
doseone
mike patton
jeff mangum
buckethead
armon pakdel

[The Good Ole Ant]

ill work inside out with this one
this will be pretentious beyond all belief, but whatever:

general schematic
eclectic approach to artistic media, artistic genres, and subject matter (derived from avant-fuckeroos like frank zappa, john zorn, and mr bungle)
occasional sardonic humor (started with the star syndicate/piconjo/ucfd, but once i gave up on ng i started listening to old school punk like dead kennedys, bad brains, public image ltd, et al as well as reading material by authors like albert camus & george orwell and a little video game called bully)
general touch of surrealism (years of crazy cartoons, mr. salvador dali, the films of lucio fulci [though some of them are cheesy as shit], and some various ng folks like coffee lock, jetninjin, zekeyspaceylizard, etc)
interest in foreign arts (this stems back to when i first started listening to talking heads. they got me into african culture and then i just let loose on other cultures)
dabbling with minimalism (the music of john cage and steve reich can be blamed for this)
existential ponderings (influenced by my own curiosity about things, albert camus, nietzsche, reverend o' malley, talking heads)
dabbling with science/math themes (my inner dork (-:0 )

general cartooning style:
conjoined eyes (i wanted a look that was different than your usual internet cartoon thing so i took paultervoorde's conjoined eye thing and altered it to my liking. eventually i started toying with weirder shapes for these eyes and now i have a whole set of different eyes!!!!)
weird looking heads i.e. odd shaped nose-chins (this was really just an outgrowth of a paranoid desire to have a unique style as opposed to some kind of influence)
trumpet noses (i originally wanted to incorporate tom nook's nose into my shit and eventually that nose evolved into trumpet nose [trumpet nose just learned metronome])
weird-looking creatures (this is really just an outgrowth of my spontaneous doodling habits. basically ill just start with eyes and a mouth and wrap a character around it)
creepy teeth (wps really made me realize that a cartoonist should be able to go from the incredibly beautiful to the incredibly macabre with his or her style, and i decided to use this little element to make my characters creepier)
differentiation in line values (i once saw a painting by ibrahim el salahi that really intrigued me because of how the lines went all topsy turvy in thickness and the such)
experimenting with geometric figures (one of my guilty pleasures is avant-garde paintings like russian constructivism, de stijl, and cubism [particularly the works of pablo picasso, vladimir tatlin, wassily kadinsky, el lissitzky, et al]. seeing a lot of these paintings made me want to mess around with geometry more often)
drastic changes in lighting (this dates back to my love of rembrandt's paintings and how much the darks and lights contrasted with each other, but of course other old world paintings as well as wps altered that as well)

other visual arts
pixel art (i guess years of video game nostalgia helped, but it more than likely stemmed from seeing so many ss members fuck around with pixel art)
fractal art (dA is, surprisingly, a great place to find good fractal art. i think i saw a DD'ed fractal and felt "dude i wanna do this." also, some of the fractals look like actual tangible objects and i guess i wanted to make tangible objects with fractal art too!!!)
photomanipulation (another dA story sadly. i saw this incredible photomanipulation dd'ed once; it was some kind of twisted silent hill-esque nightmare-scape that looked like a digital painting, but it [along with the guy's other stuff] was legit all photomanipulated. i was just flabbergasted to the point where i decided i should try to make p-m's this bizarre)
sculpture
photography (wps made me realize how photography can be incredibly generic. i thought to myself, what if the camera was used to take a picture so it would create a totally new image instead of recreating a simple scene)
terragen/space art (jagged lock's stuff always wowed me, so i decided "why not try it")
type art (influenced by a general distaste for ASCII drawings)

literature
actually writing poems and stories (two things sophmore year sparked this: 1) a crush i had one a girl named laurie murray, which led me to write my first true poem & 2) the poetic lyrics of captain beefheart)
haiku format (this actually stems back to that south park episode with the cheesy puffs commercial lmao. kyle dissed cartman with a haiku and i thought "hey i should write in haiku format sometime. it was so easy that i just kept working with it)
incorporation of old-world english (i have the poems of william blake and phyllis wheatley to thank for this)
use of different writing formats in a single piece(mr. bungle's multi-genre tomfoolery)
collage writing (one time i decided to try a cut-up writing piece a la william s burroughs with an essay on terrorism. then later on i tried a collage piece of writing, i.e. taking bits of other pieces of writing to make my own piece [this was inspired by hip-hop's sampling techniques].
appreciation for strict realism (originally i was skeptical of modern day realism in literature [i could dig it in historical fiction stories though]. then i read some of the work of jack kerouac and i was amazed by how he made the ordinary seem attention grabbing)
incorporation of other languages (i guess this stems from a belief that america is not the center of the universe... and 6 years of latin in middle/high school)
use of subtlety in satire (i used to be rather blunt with my sardonic writings thanks to a mr. jello biafra, but then i started listening to gang of four. their lyrics were sardonic but subtle, and i figured that made them more biting)

music
oh wait i don't make music. nevamind
i mean i plan on making some hip-hop music but ill wait till that actually happens before listing crap

that is me in a nutshell, i suppose

[lenko]

^ i did the conjoined eyes thing for a while due to

[ZekeySpaceyLizard]

michel gagne






ted geisel (dr.seuss)






bill wray






lou romano







donald voorhees




arthur de pins





alessandro barbucci





andrew jones

[ZekeySpaceyLizard]

chet zar





J Dillon





keith thompson






monkmus




koji morimoto

[The Good Ole Ant]

holy shit, those dr seuss paintings are phenomenal

[RobHalford]

maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan that dethklok painting is siiiiiiiiiiiiiiick

[Hnilmik]

When I was a kid (preschool-kindergarten), I asked my dad to draw me a bunch of animals. I drew a bunch of animals during this time, somewhat based on his drawings with the crayons I provided him. I then asked him to draw me a person. He refused, telling me that "I watch enough people in [Disney] cartoons to know how to draw them myself". At this time, Aladdin was on VHS and the most recent Disney movie I could think of. I gave it a try and wasn't that successful. In short, I've have more practice drawing animals since.

Then came the anime part of my childhood where I tried, futilely, to imitate the styles of Sailor Moon, DBZ, and Pokemon. What happened here is the lack of basics and a gradual deviation away from mimicry as I got tired of flat drawings. If there's one thing I wanted to avoid, it's drawing the same exact body type over and over, with just the eyes and hairstyle being the chief means of distinction between characters—Basically, Only Six Faces. Most anime are guilty of this, so I eventually got attracted to art styles that manage to pull off a Cast of Snowflakes, where it's really hard to find a character that looks a lot like another character because the artist employs a variety of different facial and body structures and whatnot.

Yusuke Murata, the illustrator for "Eyeshield 21", used to be an apprentice to the dude who does art for "Death Note", which explains the very pretty attention to detail for everything, including all of the American football equipment everyone wears (and the guns a certain batshit crazy character uses). I also like how he did a great job drawing the American team, including a black guy, without making them look too generic (or "racist") like in most anime or manga. The art in the anime is nothing compared to the manga.


I also love the art in "Gurren Lagann"~


Over the summer and around the same time as my "Gurren Lagann" obsession, I saw Valve's "Meet the Team" videos for TF2 and loved the individuality of each and every character. I learned that a lot went into the design and looks of the game too.


Being the dork I was, I joined a Tegaki RP community centered around TF2 and over time I came to appreciate the unique styles everyone used to bring their characters to life instead of focusing on "who was the better artist in skill and technique". From there, I decided to focus more on creating my own style instead of believing that I lived constantly in the shadow of better artists.

Here are some of my artist friends from the community:
P-RO


Monkeyoo


Marr (Marinayoshi on dA)


Phuzzypanda


Then I got exposed to a variety of talented animators with unique styles (and characters) while thinking to myself: "Damn, I wanna bring their characters to life someday!" Like: rtil, lenko, Unknown-Person - (whoa asdgh), and Zeurel--the last two primarily since they're animating machines who can churn out crazy-pretty fight animations under a time limit for original character tournaments. + TARBOY (too lazy to look up the animator)

I also dig the art of "Avatar the Last Airbender" with it's beautiful fight choreography and dipping into the voice acting side of things, I <3 Grey DeLisle since she voiced for Azula, Vicky ("Fairly OddParents"), and a bunch of other characters. She has a wide range and most certainly knows how to bring those characters to life.

Another voice acting influence is Nicole Sullivan, who voiced for Shego in "Kim Possible" and other frank characters. She pretty much gave me hope that I didn't need a super high voice or a "super model voice" to play awesome characters.

[CVG]

These are probably the biggest influences I've had


Stephen Gammell-drew for "scary stories to tell in the dark" childrens books





Edward Gorey



Jose Guadalupe Posada



Felix the Cat...and a ton of old 1920-30s cartoons actually






Steve Purcell-Sam and Max Comics



Pink Floyds-The Wall



Calvin and Hobbes


and if you want to get "old school"...

Albrecht Dürer
<I was inspired by his intricate line work! I always tried to copy it...



and Cornelius De Vos


<art like this influenced my love for well drawn dead animals and creep situations that were intended to be "normal"
<the details in body, expressions, creepyness. Look at how he's so fat that his foot is a blob and that one guy is pinching his fat haha



Fransisco Goya-his art always had double meanings and playfull (semicartoony) mixed with macabre surreal



<<<PARTY HATS!! HAHA!!

<<DONKEY DANCE!!

[redmongoose]

http://www.thebackalleys.com/ok/public/714...ur_Head_Off.mp3

[The Good Ole Ant]

pub rock!!!!

[lenko]

Aaand now for the noncommercial side

i like drawing monsters and golems and chimera-like things that fuse shit together sooo ancient culture and mythology has always been a massive inspiration. also i cant get enough of putting ruins/temples into my shizz or hinting at a civilization that came prior to the current one happening in the story

[Mew_User]

Max Ernst

Jacek Yerka

Man Ray

Alex Grey

David McKean

Gregory Crewdson

Chiho Aoshima


Literature:
W. Somerset Maugham
William S. Burroughs
Kurt Vonnegut
Christopher Moore

Music:
Philip Glass
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Mike Oldfield
Robert Rich
Steve Roach
Klaus Schulze
Jean Michel Jarre
Vangelis
Pierre Schaeffer
John Cage
Soft Machine
Tangerine Dream
Faust
Richard D. James
Squarepusher
Boards of Canada
The Future Sound of London

[The Good Ole Ant]

niceeeee picks bamyasi

but where the fuck is can?

[emanhattan]

this thread made me feel even shittier about my drawings

but it was also phun to see where everyones style "comes from"

[trent bortknob]

Music:
Philip Glass
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Mike Oldfield
Robert Rich
Steve Roach
Klaus Schulze
Jean Michel Jarre
Vangelis
Pierre Schaeffer
John Cage
Soft Machine
Tangerine Dream
Faust
Richard D. James
Squarepusher
Boards of Canada
The Future Sound of London

my brother would love you

[The Good Ole Ant]

i love him too